A study of the sensitivity of "customer voice" in QFD analysis

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) using the method of House of Quality (HOQ) is a qualitative tool to help the management incorporate customer requirements into the product and process development. In the analysis of HOQ, a small difference of the weights of the customer requirements may affect the result of the HOQ, which then influence subsequent outcomes such as the prioritization and allocation of resources. On the other hand, it is usually difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate information about the customer needs. In this paper, a more formal study is carried out to examine the sensitivity related to customer needs. The Analytic Hierarchy Process method (AHP) is used to obtain the relative importance of the customer voice. An example is presented to illustrate how to conduct a sensitivity analysis. In general, the ranking is not sensitive to customer voice as the discrete weightage used for the correlation matrix. Significance: A small change of the weights is shown not to affect the final ranking of the technical responses in the HOQ; hence QFD is a robust method for prioritization. The result suggests that we can spend more time with the relationship metrics and other issues when using QFD.