Quality function deployment (QFD) is a product development process performed to maximize customer satisfaction.
Pepsi has created a troubleshooting guide for 7-Eleven store operators and sends members of its product development team to perform service on the machines.
With the beginning of the fourth Industrial Revolution (Industrial 4.0) and the rising efforts to realize a smart factory environment, also product development has to perform a substantial transformation.
To coordinate such dispersed processes a critical role of managers is to establish and foster a culture that implicitly rewards and motivates product development teams to perform against a set of strategic metrics such as customer satisfaction, time to market, defect reduction, or platform reuse.
Ideas regularly percolate up from new product development since high performing development teams, being closest to the action, live on the fringes of the organization and mingle with the vendors, users, competitors and regulators, while experienced competitors emerge, rise and retreat.
This chapter will discuss design and product development for performance apparel; that is the methods, processes, and approaches employed by those involved in developing apparel products, which must perform for a particular purpose or for multiple functions.
It is important for small and medium-sized corporations to collaborate in networks in order to develop capacity, capability, and competence to perform product development and become suppliers of complete systems.
