A novel belief-based QFD-AHP model in interval type-2 fuzzy environment for lean after-sales service in automotive industry
International Journal of Lean Six Sigma
ISSN: 2040-4166
Article publication date: 10 January 2023
Issue publication date: 12 April 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel lean management tool to provide a comprehensive and flexible evaluation model while converting customer voices into technical characteristics in lean implementations.
Design/methodology/approach
For this purpose, the proposed model was constructed by belief space-evaluations, quality function deployment (QFD) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) environment. This model involves three phases: determining the linguistic weights and belief-based relations with their IT2F-sets, processing information about IT2F-based belief-evaluations and ranking the technical characteristics using the defuzzified belief-based relative importance values.
Findings
The proposed model was applied to automotive after-sales service in Turkey to demonstrate its use in lean service-decisions. This model was compared with its classical and type-1 fuzzy versions. The ranking-results of the proposed model differed from those of the other versions. The reason is that the IT2F-environment offers a sensitive and flexible evaluation of the model’s linguistic scales.
Research limitations/implications
Calculations in the proposed model may be quite involved for practitioners. An Excel-dashboard was created to simplify the computational complexity.
Practical implications
Researchers/practitioners can apply this model to any lean manufacturing/service implementation.
Social implications
Company managers/employees/customers can recognize their perception-mechanisms via belief space-evaluations and experience how uncertainty in the perception-mechanism affects their decisions.
Originality/value
The proposed model provides a new lean tool due to the Bayesian model combined with QFD-AHP in IT2F-environment. This model eliminates the ambiguity in conceptual change-based lean decisions.
Keywords
Citation
Baskir, M.B. (2023), "A novel belief-based QFD-AHP model in interval type-2 fuzzy environment for lean after-sales service in automotive industry", International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 653-678. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLSS-03-2022-0055
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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