QFD-ID: QFD-Forum Ausgabe 26

The difficulty of competing in today’s business environment lies not only in the number of additional competitors worldwide, but also in the increasingly heterogeneous needs of the customers. Gilmore and Pine (2000) spoke of "Markets of One", taking the idea of Mass Customization to the extreme. Mass Customization promises to enable companies to offer a large variety of products while still being able to manage the complexity caused by this increased number of products. We extended QFD by adding two new matrices, one of them called the Product Portfolio Matrix, to allow for using QFD to develop a platform-based product portfolio. This paper describes how QFD can help companies to identify the products, i.e. combinations of product characteristics, that the customers really want, thereby severely reducing the solution space and limiting development risks. In addition to describing the method and related research, an example application from the software domain is given.

Product Portfolio Planning using QFD

Abstract