Integration of QFD, AHP, and LPP methods in supplier development problems under uncertainty

Zahra Shad,Fatemeh Mojibian,Emad Roghanian

doi:10.1007/s40092-014-0051-0

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-driven approach, widely used to develop or process new product to maximize customer satisfaction. Last researches used linear physical programming (LPP) procedure to optimize QFD; however, QFD issue involved uncertainties, or fuzziness, which requires taking them into account for more realistic study. In this paper, a set of fuzzy data is used to address linguistic values parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. Proposed integrated approach including analytic hierarchy process (AHP), QFD, and LPP to maximize overall customer satisfaction under uncertain conditions and apply them in the supplier development problem. The fuzzy AHP approach is adopted as a powerful method to obtain the relationship between the customer requirements and engineering characteristics (ECs) to construct house of quality in QFD method. LPP is used to obtain the optimal achievement level of the ECs and subsequently the customer satisfaction level under different degrees of uncertainty. The effectiveness of proposed method will be illustrated by an example.

Highlights

The increasing global competition and cooperation and the vertical disintegration of production activities have created the logistical challenge of coordinating the entire supply chain (SC) effectively, upstream to downstream activities (Gebennini et al 2009)
The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach is adopted as a powerful method to obtain the relationship between the customer requirements and engineering characteristics (ECs) to construct house of quality in Quality function deployment (QFD) method
Due to the high importance of the Supply chain management (SCM), the aim of this paper is to develop a useful approach by integrating fuzzy AHP, fuzzy QFD (FQFD), and linear physical programming (LPP) to obtain the optimal values of the ECs of the suppliers

Summary

Introduction

The increasing global competition and cooperation and the vertical disintegration of production activities have created the logistical challenge of coordinating the entire supply chain (SC) effectively, upstream to downstream activities (Gebennini et al 2009). Chain management (SCM) integrates suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers to meet final consumer needs and expectations efficiently and effectively (Cox 1999). The basis of QFD is to obtain and translate customer requirements into engineering characteristics, and subsequently into part characteristics, process plans, and production requirements. This paper is concentrated on the HOQ, which translates customer requirements into the engineering characteristics. QFD can be used as a useful method to translate the requirements of each level to the ECs of the previous level. AHP method can be used as a powerful multi-criteria tool to extract the relationships between the requirements of each level and ECs of the previous level. QFD implementation extended recently, only a few researchers focused in the supply chain (e.g., Zarei et al 2011; Hassanzadeh Amin and Razmi 2009)

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion