OLD PROCEDURE - NEW APPROACHES: QFD WITH CHATGPT - COMPREHENSIVE PRODUCT AND PROCESS UNDERSTANDING IN ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Nutzmann, Marc; Sauer, Thorsten; Voss, Markus; Bozkurt, Hulusi
Series: E&PDE
Institution: IHB Institute for Educational Research in Higher Education; DHBW Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Ravensburg, Germany; DHBW Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Mannheim, Germany
Page(s): 378 - 383
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.64
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a known procedure used to ensure that customer needs and expectations are translated into product features. This can be gained by applying the ""House of Quality"" (HoQ). The different sections guide students through important engineering processes from addressing customer and user needs and expectations, defining specifications, finding relations and evaluating those, leading to defining target values by looking into competitor analysis. Students of mechanical engineering learn about QFD in Quality Management, a lecture in their third year of the curriculum. They have already gained lectures on engineering design, methods and processes. Through their practical work in their company they have worked on at least one larger engineering project (six months). QFD can help to repeat and deepen their engineering knowledge. Over the years several products have been chosen as examples for applying QFD. The QFD applications, executed in teams, show that even though these products are daily used products it helps to foster creativity (re-development approaches) and deepen knowledge about products and their value - especially from a customer’s, respectively user’s view and the engineering challenges in realisation. After introducing the basics of QFD the students are actively asked to team-up and to find a product example. These are mostly very basic products of daily use, e.g. household goods or products of daily life (thermos flask, razor, pen, smart phone). Using Chat GPT and prompting typical questions usually asked by the lecturer while applying QFD shows that more innovative products can be found that require technical knowledge beyond the field of mechanical engineering. ChatGPT can pave the way through applying QFD in an unknown context. The paper will point out a team orientated approach of educating students applying QFD, repeating already educated knowledge on engineering processes and showing how QFD leads to creativity and challenges in context of daily-used product examples and innovative service products in rather unknown fields by applying ChatGPT. The learnings of applying ChatGPT are used to setup guidelines for student´s practical work, research work (study work, bachelor thesis) and future education.
Keywords: QFD, Quality Function Deployment, engineering products, AI support in QFD, AI guideline