Published Paper Details:

This paper deals with the integration of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Value Engineering (VE) in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) planning process. Quality function Deployment enhances the product/service performance on the basis of customer�s requirements, whereas Value engineering focuses on the reduction of product/service costs without decreasing its quality or performance. The integration of QFD and VE both will lead to the decrease of costs and improvements of product/service or performance. In this paper firstly a conceptual idea of integrating these two techniques is provided and after that its implementation procedures are described in detail. The integration of quality function deployment and value engineering was analyzed in the product planning process. For this aim a conceptual model was developed. The application stages were also clarified. In fact the planned Model was an QFD & V.E integration ,in which the whole QFD process is not completely implemented rather its first two phases ,that is the product projection and product planning are carried and a list of results along with their value is got from the house of quality. The V.E process is not implemented completely either, rather the solutions and their relative values are entered from the second quality house into the second phase of Value engineering .During the design stage, lot of information is gathered and analyzed to back up the decision making process which will lead to the synthesis of products. The objective of the paper is focusing on mainly two things. Firstly, I seek to take the QFD and VE methodology one step further and apply it to propose a stakeholder-based design for the NICU facilities. Secondly, I demonstrate the outcomes of the QFD and VE methodology in the NICU design. I have started with the NICU not only because of its importance but also for its complexity which makes it a challenging quest. I have then implemented the House of Quality (HoQ) methodology in order to obtain an improved design over the existing ones. In doing so, I have made use of some of the most commonly used international standards (IS). This paper intends to give a more balanced review of Quality Function Deployment and Value Engineering that shows enough depth to be valuable to researchers as well as enough scope to provide for the readers.