Abstract
Engineered emotion: A product should evoke positive emotions in the customer. During product development a vast array of interpretations of abstract customer requirements - which is nearly impossible to fathom - opens up to the engineer, who is used to focusing on facts and figures. This entails the risk of not meeting these requirements with absolute accuracy. The application of QFD - Quality Function Deployment - offers a means of guiding the engineer through customer´s´ requirements, which are usually expressed in rather subjective or emotional terms. In addition to addressing the manifold requirements as such, weighting them is another direct outcome of this method, allowing costs and efforts to be optimized.
The multidimensional field of steering behavior and steering feeling offers a wide variety of interpretations of the type of vehicle the customer would wish for. In this context several, mutually influencing product aspects such as steering system design, kinematics, chassis design, or perhaps merely the selection of suitable tires, could be attributable to a customer requirement which might have been worded as "precise steering.". The specification of target parameters for the items named as the basis for the design process is the job of the engineer. Between these poles, i.e. the customer´s´ emotions and the facts and figures required by engineer´s, the application of QFD (Quality Function Deployment), a tried and tested method, is intended as a tool.
Using the challenge to optimize steering behavior from the customer´s point of view, the authors apply the advanced method, IMPROVE by QFD (Integrated Market Related Product Optimisation for Vehicle Engineering), to the European market. Aside from the approaches and the method itself, the presentation describes the experience gathered in the sedan segment in particular, including statements by more than 230 customer´s and representives of the press at different European locations. The customer requirements were recorded according to statistical principles and processed further to show results in terms of target values for the engineer´s, using a QFD matrix specially adapted to the handling properties of vehicles. For this reason, a detailed subjective and objective benchmarking program, based on vehicle performance properties as well as chassis design parameters, was conducted, too. [5,6]
The result: multidimensional influences on handling properties can be addressed by IMPROVE by QFD. Furthermore, unclear statements by customer´s can be translated into vocabulary suitable for engineer´s. "Over-engineering" is successfully detected by the methodical approach and allows maximum efficiency in the use of development / production budgets. The result is a time- and cost-optimized scenario for chassis design with optimized steering behavior from the customer´s point of view.. The objective was to achieve customer-oriented design of the handling properties - or simply stated: Engineered emotion.
Keywords:Steering Behavior and Feeling, Customer Requirements, Translation into Technical Specifications, QFD - Process, IMPROVE by QFD