A novice-friendly decision support system prototype for quality function deployment (QFD) called QFD Optimizer is developed based upon an integrated mathematical programming formulation and solution approach. QFD Optimizer not only helps a design team build a house of quality chart, but also supports them in understanding and analyzing the system interrelationships, as well as obtaining optimal target engineering characteristic values. QFD Optimizer was tested experimentally and in a real design setting on students and practitioners to ascertain its potential viability and effectiveness. The results suggest that it has the potential to help users find improved feasible designs yielding higher customer satisfaction (i.e., improving quality of design) more rapidly (i.e., reduce the design cycle time), compared with the current manual, ad hoc approach. QFD Optimizer can be used by novice as well as expert users, and leads to a better understanding of complex interrelationships between customer needs and the engineering characteristics and among the engineering characteristics. Hence, it can and has been used as an effective quality improvement training tool, and shows promise for application in practice. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.
