Interoperability of QFD, FMEA, and KCs methods in the product development process

Current market conditions require design and manufacturing companies to continuously increase product functionality, reduce design cycles, decrease cost and improve quality. Today, there are many quality methods but the links allowing the passage from a method to the other are not well defined and the designer does not have a global vision of these methods in the product lifecycle. To improve the product quality, it's necessary to reveal the relations between these methods. This paper studies three of the most popular quality methods: quality function deployment (QFD), failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA), and key characteristics (KCs) methods. It analyses the complementarity and the inter-relations among them and presents an activity diagram that shows their interoperability. An example of a car door is presented to illustrate our proposal. Finally, an information model is proposed to formalize these methods in a common framework in order to support the quality team work.