ABSTRACT
Due to technological innovations and changing customer demand, many firms realize that getting high-quality products to customers in a timely manner is crucial for their survival in the competitive market. Product development process is a complex managerial process, which involves multifunctional groups with different perspectives. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a new product development process that stresses cross-functional integration and ensures quality at each stage of the product development and the production process. Quality function deployment is a planning methodology for translating customer needs into quality characteristics and the improved quality of an existing product.
The objective of this article is to maximize customer satisfaction for a fork assembly in an automobile spares manufacturing industry using two different approaches, namely traditional QFD (crisp approach) and fuzzy triangular methods. The fuzzy approach has been developed to address the ambiguity in technical characteristics. Finally, these two approaches have been compared to highlight which applies better for the case study.