Coping with diversity ratings in prioritizing design requirements in quality function deployment: A consensus-based approach with minimum-maximum adjustments

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a powerful customer-driven quality management tool that improves product quality by translating customer requirements (CRs) into design requirements (DRs) of a product. It is essential in QFD to obtain the importance ratings of DRs from the importance ratings of CRs and the relationship between CRs and DRs. However, two basic challenges hinder the effective implementation of QFD: (i) vague assessments of the relationship between CRs and DRs due to the inherent uncertainty in human judgement; and (ii) diverse importance ratings of DRs owing to the heterogeneity of the QFD team members. To this end, this study provides a consensus-based QFD to derive the consensual importance ratings of DRs, where linguistic distributions are used by the QFD team to express their assessments of the relationship between CRs and DRs. In the consensus-based QFD, a minimum–maximum adjustment consensus model is presented to assist the QFD team in deriving a consensual assessment regarding the relationship between CRs and DRs. This model is designed by minimizing the maximum adjustment between the original and the adjusted linguistic distribution assessments. Moreover, some desirable properties of the minimum–maximum adjustment consensus model are investigated. Finally, a case study, a detailed sensitivity analysis, and a comparison analysis are presented to illustrate the validity of our proposal.