Effective design of online shopping websites is the need of the hour as design plays a crucial role in the success of online shopping businesses. Recently, the use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been reported for the design of online shopping websites. QFD is a customer driven process that encompasses voluminous data gathered from customers through several techniques like personal interview, focus groups, surveys etc. This massive, unsorted and unstructured data is required to be transformed into a limited number of structured information to represent the actual Customer Needs (CNs) which are then utilized in subsequent stages of QFD process. This can be achieved through brainstorming using techniques like Affinity Process. However, integrating the Affinity Process within QFD is tedious and time consuming and cannot be dealt with manually. This generates a pressing need for a software tool to serve the purpose. Moreover, the researches carried out so far have focused on QFD application, post the generation of CNs. Also, the available QFD softwares lack the option to generate CNs from collected data. Thus, the paper aims to develop a novel software tool that integrates Affinity Process with QFD to generate customers' needs for effective design of online shopping websites. The software system is developed using Visual Basic Dot Net (VB.Net) that integrates a MS-Access database.

Efficient Database design is the key part of software development. A properly built database acts as the backbone of the software system and makes enhancing software more easily and quickly. Quality Function Deployment and data mining itself are very gordian processes. Thus, there is strong need of database for handling complex transactions of Quality Function Deployment along with data mining and accessing precise and up-to-date information concerned to this. Forecasting in Quality Function Deployment can be time consuming when computed manually. Hence, development of data mining driven forecasting software tool can give better results and also save time. This paper focuses on the database design for the development of data mining driven forecasting software tool for Quality Function Deployment. Here, first brief discussion on Quality Function Deployment and data mining followed by its concise literature review is presented. Later on, the integrated value chain needed by data mining driven forecasting system for Quality Function deployment is discussed. Then the flow chart illustrating the processes of the software tool is intended. Afterwards the tabulated schemas of logical part of database have been presented. Finally, the ER-diagram for the software and described the relationships among the tables have been designed followed by conclusion. Recognizing the general architecture and structural component of database system will lend a hand to designers and engineers successfully build up and sustain forecasting software tool.