This paper presents a strategic approach for effectively differentiating the quality of a product from its competing products. The proposed approach utilizes quality function deployment (QFD) to capture customer requirements, technical requirements and quality characteristics ofthe product. The newly introduced technical requirements are concerned with the feasibilit・y of the target quality (i.e., the target values of the quality characteristics) to be determined. [Phen, the appToach adopts

more »

... y logic to quantify the relationships between the quality characteristic values and the satisfaction levels of the requirements, and to evaluate the technical feasibilit・y of t・he target quality. As a result, it becomes possible to capture the target qua]ity determinat5on for the product as a muki-objective optimization problem of enhancing the sadsfaction levels of the customer requirements while ensuring the technical feasibility of the target quality. Then, in order to dea] with this problem in a strategic way, the condition required fbr differentiating the product quality from its compethig products is given. Further, a function which measures the extent of the differentiation is defined according to the preferences among customer requirements and which customer requirements are chosen as the order winning criteria for the product. Accordingly, t・he multi-objective quality planning problem is translated into a problem of maximizing the extent of the differentiation under some feasibility constraints. Finally, a simple example illustrates hcrw the proposed approach works.