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Prioritizing technical requirements in QFD by integrating grey relational analysis method and analytic network process approach

Chuanmin Mi (College of Economics & Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China)
Weiguo Xia (College of Economics & Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China)

Grey Systems: Theory and Application

ISSN: 2043-9377

Article publication date: 2 February 2015

796

Abstract

Purpose

No matter in product design stage or product quality improvement stage, the product technical requirements (PTRs) impacting on product performance are mainly identified and improved to optimize customer needs (CNs) as greatly as possible. The purpose of this paper is to use a new approach to accurately and properly prioritize PTRs in Quality Function Deployment (QFD).

Design/methodology/approach

Considering the relationship between CNs and PTRs in QFD hard to quantitatively measure and lack of adequate information, the grey relational analysis (GRA) is applied. Besides, owing to the inherent inner dependencies of CNs as well as QFD, the analytic network process (ANP) which is an effective tool to take into account the inner dependencies with network is utilized. Finally, an integrated framework based on GRA method and ANP approach is proposed to determine the importance degrees of PTRs in designing a product.

Findings

The calculation results of the application show that the proposed framework by integrating GRA and ANP is able to determine the importance degrees of PTRs in design a product well.

Practical implications

In the application part the authors can see the proposed framework can be applied to PVC window systems. Owing to that traditional QFD method has been widely used in many fields such as manufacturing industry and service industry, actually the proposed framework has great potential application in the real word.

Originality/value

This paper succeeds in proposing a new framework by integrating GRA and ANP to determine the importance degrees of PTRs in QFD.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The relevant researches done in this paper are supported by the NUAA Fundamental Research Funds (No. NS2013080), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. NJ20140033).

Citation

Mi, C. and Xia, W. (2015), "Prioritizing technical requirements in QFD by integrating grey relational analysis method and analytic network process approach", Grey Systems: Theory and Application, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 117-126. https://doi.org/10.1108/GS-11-2014-0040

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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