The 50 Anniversary of Quality Function Deployment Research

Ever since Akao and Mizuno introduced the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in 1972, the model has been widely applied and studied around the world. In celebrating the 50 anniversary of QFD, this study aims to use Main Path Analysis (MPA) in order to analyze the trajectory of QFD study over the past 50 years and to propose possible research trends for further study. Authors use keywords, such as ‘QFD’ and ‘House of Quality’, to collect data from the Scopus database. There were 6,736 articles extracted, which were further analyzed with the use of MPA. As the result of our analysis, we found that in the past 50 years the QFD research main path was focused on methodology improvements and the combination of QFD with other methods to ensure the accuracy of ‘voice of customer’ interpretation. First of all, one needs to solve the problem of transforming CRs to ECs. The main path literature addresses this problem with a variety of methods, which include MCDA, MCDM, fuzzy logic, Fuzzy QFD, etc. The second issue is related to the prioritization of CRs. Some authors used MILP, Kano modeling fuzzy methods to solve this problem. ECs optimization constitutes the third issue that QFD users face. The MIGP, the rough set, the grey relational analysis, hierarchical structures, and other techniques and methods were exploited to solve the third problem.