New Approach for Quality Function Deployment Based on Linguistic Distribution Assessments and CRITIC Method

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-oriented quality management tool used to maximize customer satisfaction by considering the correlations between customer requirements and engineering characteristics. However, the conventional QFD method exhibits some shortcomings when used in real situations, especially in terms of correlation evaluation and engineering characteristic ranking. Therefore, the objective of this study is to propose a new QFD approach based on linguistic distribution assessments and the CRiteria Importance Through Inter-Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method to improve the effectiveness of the traditional QFD. Specifically, linguistic distribution assessments are utilized to describe the relationships between customer requirements and engineering characteristics. The CRITIC method is extended and used to determine the ranking orders of the engineering characteristics identified in QFD. To demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed QFD, a case example regarding the performance management system’s development is presented. It is shown that the QFD approach proposed in this paper can not only represent experts’ uncertain linguistic relationship evaluations flexibly but also determine more reliable importance rankings of engineering characteristics in production planning.