The importance of metrics for the evaluation of design performance for an axiomatic design system development

This paper explains the role of metrics and their important contribution in assessing how far a system is with respect to a target. This is even more important to establish a common language and to drive an organization towards goals being sure at the same time each part of the organization itself is aligned. Measuring performances through a shared and accepted metric is even more critical as a tool to achieve the continuous improvement of traded solutions, design parameters, and processes. It allows one to quantify how much a system is currently providing in terms of outputs and to plan the next steps to achieve the expected performances if a misalignment is detected. Metrics, compared with targets, make the appraiser able to measure advances and next actions to deploy. This paper proposes a system of metrics to drive the choice of design parameters of both physical and non-physical systems (human organizations for instance) through the decomposition. In this context the quality function deployment links back the design parameters to customer needs through the found system of metrics and provides a tool for assessing the goodness of found solutions.