Development of a Customized User-Interface Tool for Quality Function Deployment

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a complex product development process that strives for higher quality and better customer satisfaction. Matrices are the cornerstones of the QFD process. Albeit, each of the matrices in QFD serves a different purpose, the fundamental requirements for them are usually the same. First, the matrices need to show some data in vertical-oriented mode. Second, the matrices require a multi-input mode or a grid layout for the data input. Thus, in QFD software, a user-interface must comply with these two needs. This calls for the development of a customized user-interface to meet the aforementioned needs. To this end, the paper attempts to develop a customized user-interface for QFD using Visual Basic 6.0 (VB). The paper considers an Ms-Flexgrid tool offered by VB and a set of Application Programming Interface (API) for the proposed task. The end result of this work will be an efficient customized user-interface for QFD, which supports vertical text and multi-input mode, and thus, can be effectively utilized in QFD software for matrix driven operations with least effort