A systematic methodology to deal with the dynamics of customer needs in Quality Function Deployment
Journal article, 2011

In the context of a customer-driven product or service design process, a timely update of customer needs information may not only serve as a useful indicator to observe how things change over time, but it also provides the company a better ground to formulate strategies to meet the future needs of its customer. This paper proposes a systematic methodology to deal with customer needs’ dynamics, in terms of their relative weights, in the QFD. Compared to previous research, its contribution is three-fold. First, it proposes the use of a forecasting technique which is effective to model the dynamics of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based importance rating. This is owing to the fact that the AHP has been applied very extensively in the QFD and there is, unfortunately, almost no tool to model the dynamics. Second, it describes more comprehensively on how future uncertainty in the weights of customer needs may be estimated and transmitted to the design attributes. Third, it proposes the use a quantitative approach that takes into account the decision maker’s attitude towards risk to optimize the QFD decision making analysis. Finally, an example based on a real-world application of QFD is provided to show the practical applicability of the proposed methodology.

Quality Function Deployment

Stochastic dominance

Analytic Hierarchy Process

Future uncertainty

Dynamics of customer needs

Author

Hendry Raharjo

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Quality Sciences

Min Xie

National University of Singapore (NUS)

Aarnout Brombacher

Eindhoven University of Technology

Expert Systems with Applications

0957-4174 (ISSN)

Vol. 38 4 3653-3662

Subject Categories

Other Mechanical Engineering

Computer and Information Science

Business Administration

Areas of Advance

Production

DOI

10.1016/j.eswa.2010.09.021

More information

Latest update

5/3/2018 9