Investigations Into More Exact Weightings of Customer Demands in QFD

Abstract

Apart from the customer demands themselves, the weightings of the customer demands are one of the main input data of a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and furthermore of the actual construction process of products. Up to now, most interviews with stakeholders have been carried out with questionnaires and then absolute weightings have been used. Now it has been analysed if the use of other interview and evaluation techniques, e.g. relative weightings and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), can improve the precision of the demands and wishes of the stakeholders. Now the task was to analyse if the use of relative weightings as input of a QFD is possible at all, how they have to be adapted and if an increase in precision compared to the use of absolute weightings is reached. When using AHP during the product development it has become clear that only up to seven demands can be rated at the same time by customers. That means that a kind of hierarchy has to be developed to correctly transfer the demands and their weightings into the QFD.

Citation

Crostack, H.‐., Hackenbroich, I., Refflinghaus, R. and Winter, D. (2007), "Investigations Into More Exact Weightings of Customer Demands in QFD", Asian Journal on Quality, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/15982688200700026