Prioritisation of engineering characteristics in QFD in the case of customer requirements orderings

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment is an effective tool to orient the design of a product and related production processes towards the real exigencies of the end-user. Its first phase – the house of quality – is aimed at translating customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) of the product of interest, also determining an ECs’ prioritisation. All of the techniques proposed for tackling this problem are based on the assumption that the importance of each CR is expressed on interval or ratio scales (i.e. cardinal scales). To this end, customer evaluations – naturally expressed on ordinal scales – are artfully turned into numbers. This study introduces a novel technique – denominated as ordinal prioritisation method – that can be applied to prioritise ECs. The method addresses the problem of the prioritisation of ECs when the importance of CRs is given on an ordinal scale. The description of the method is supported by some application examples.

Keywords:

• Quality Function Deployment
• house of quality
• data fusion
• aggregation
• prioritisation
• engineering characteristics
• customer requirements
• independent scoring method, ordinal scale