Fuzzy relative importance of customer requirements in improving product development

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an effective tool to enhance customer satisfaction, develop the product quality and enhance competitive advantages in the market. In developing new products and projects, we receive the needs from the customer, pass it around a corporate communication circle, and eventually return it to the customer in the form of the new product. First, needs and languages received from customer might be ambiguous or imprecise, causing deviated studied results and disregarding of the voice of customer. Second, to improve quality and solve the uncertainty in product development process, numerous researchers try to apply the fuzzy set theory to product development. Their models usually focus only on customer requirements or on engineering characteristics. The subsequent stages of product design are rarely addressed. The correlation between engineering features and benchmarking analysis often disregarded in most of QFD practice related researches. This commonly affects the project and failed product development-project. Aiming to solve these three issues, the purpose of this paper is to increase the accuracy of QFD, optimize and develop the customer requirements approach to attenuate risks in subsequent phases and in on-line process (manufacturing) to increase industrial performance. This approach based on Fuzzy sets theory and Alpha-cut operations, Pairwise comparison method, and fuzzy ranking and clustering method, and on theory of inventive problems solving (TRIZ).