Int. J. Decision Sciences, Risk and Management, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2015 63 Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Planning customer requirements and engineering characteristics in avoiding product development quality risks Fateh Bencherif* and Leila Hayet Mouss Department of Industrial Engineering, APCL, University of Batna, Batna 05000, Algeria Email: f.bencherif@hotmail.fr Email: hayet_mouss@yahoo.fr *Corresponding author Abstract: Product development is the process of bringing a new product to market. Quality function deployment is a product development tool to improve customer satisfaction, design the product quality and enhance competitiveness of the company in the market. In developing new products, we capture the requirements from the customer, and return it to the customer as a new product. Requirements and customer’s language might be imprecise, causing inconsistent studied results and deviating of the voice of customer. These generally cause failure of a product development project. To improve quality in product development process, fuzzy set theory is employed in the product development phases. This model focuses on customer requirements and on engineering characteristics. The correlation between engineering requirements and benchmarking analysis, often ignored in most of QFD researches, are considered. Aiming to solve these problems, this paper aims to improve the precision of QFD first phase, and optimise and develop the customer requirements approach to reduce risks in subsequent phases. Keywords: fuzzy set theory; product development quality risks; quality function deployment; QFD; theory of inventive problems solving. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bencherif, F. and Mouss, L.H. (2015) ‘Planning customer requirements and engineering characteristics in avoiding product development quality risks’, Int. J. Decision Sciences, Risk and Management, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.63–79. Biographical notes: Fateh Bencherif had his Industrial Engineering diploma in 2003 and a Magistere in 2009 at University of Batna. Currently, he is a PhD student in the same university. He is a Teacher in the University of Batna and in the professional education institute. He is interested in innovation systems, project management and product development. Leila Hayet Mouss received her BSc in Electrical Engineering in 1979, from the National Polytechnic School of Algiers, Algeria and MSc and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and the University Habilitation degree from the University of Batna, Batna, Algeria, in 2005. She received her Professor degree in 2014, from the University of Batna, Algeria. She is the Head of the Automatic and Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory (LAP).