Sensitivity of the relationship matrix in quality function deployment

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) adopts a customer-driven approach and provides a structural way to ensure that the final product or service meets customer requirements. As the central part of the house of quality (HOQ), the relationship matrix links customer attributes and technical responses through a two-dimensional diagram. As the weightage used is discrete in nature, the ranking of technical responses is sensitive to the scoring system. The technical priority guides QFD practitioners in making trade-offs for resource allocation and directs the downstream QFD activities. The stability of the technical priority values is, hence, important and desirable. To minimize the variability of technical priority, an optimization model is developed and its optimal solution is employed as the scoring system in the calculation of the final technical importance. Two examples are presented to illustrate the use of the model. Some implementation issues relating to the proposed approach are also discussed.