Green QFD-II: A life cycle approach for environmentally conscious manufacturing by integrating LCA and LCC into QFD matrices

Green Quality Function Deployment-II (GQFD-II), a new methodology for product development or improvement, is introduced in this paper. By integrating Life Cycle Costing (LCC) into QFD matrices and deploying quality, environmental and cost requirements throughout the entire product development process, GQFD-II elaborates the original GQFD, in which Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and QFD are combined to evaluate different product concepts. GQFD-II includes three major phases. Phase I Technical Requirement Identification. Quality house, green house and cost house are established in this phase, where customer, environmental and cost requirements are established and documented. Phase II Product Concept Generation. A series of product concepts are generated to satisfy the requirements established from Phase I. These concepts can be evaluated with respect to quality, environment and cost. The best product concept is then selected. Phase III Product/Process Design. In this phase, the requirements from previous phases are deployed into all product/process design stages, so that a series of matrices can be established, including: design deployment, process planning, production planning, maintenance planning, and retirement planning. In this paper, an illustrative example (engine filters) is used to demonstrate the concept of GQFD-II.