An empirical study on simultaneous achievement of quality, cost and timing in product development

This empirical study investigates the simultaneous attainment of quality, cost and timing (QCT) in product development. The findings are based on a postal survey of 207 Japanese manufacturing companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Part I. Two subsystems of the target-costing system, named QFD and VE, are compared as the tools for handling QCT for both model change (MC) and entirely new (EN) products. We evaluated the combined effects of the variables on QCT performance through a variation of logistic regression of ordinal categorical variables, called the proportional odds model. Results show that the ways of improving the quality performance of MC or EN products at the highest level are different from the way of attaining QCT simultaneously. Again, the ways of improving the cost and timing performance at the highest level for both the products are the same as the way of furnishing the simultaneous achievement of QCT. The simultaneous attainment of QCT is possible if companies give priority to both quality and cost issues for fixing their targets, use QFD for determining cost improvement objects, and emphasise both mechanism and cost deployments for detecting bottlenecks. The findings suggest that QFD dominates over VE for both MC and EN products in achieving each of the QCT targets and even for their simultaneous attainment.