Prioritization of Design Requirements for Quality Engineering Education

Abstract

The educational institutions must strive to impart quality education and have to create greater satisfaction in their customer group. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) which is a customer driven tool in implementing Total Quality Management (TQM) helps to accomplish this task. One of the phases in QFD methodology is known as House of Quality (HoQ), which is concerned with translating the voice of customer into design requirements by stakeholders. Design requirements will determine how the customer needs are to be fulfilled. This paper presents an integrated methodology (HoQ-ANP) to translate Voices of Customer (VoC) or customer needs (CNs) into design requirements (DRs) and to determine the importance weights of DRs by considering the complex dependency relationships between and within Customer needs and DRs for total quality in engineering education. In order to deal with the vagueness, uncertainty and diversity in dependency relationships fuzzy set theory and group decision-making technique are used to determine the priority structure of CNs, inner dependence among Customer Needs (CNs), Inner dependence among DRs and inter-relationship between CNs & DRs. Prioritization of design requirements for quality engineering education is determined through a case study by employing HoQ-ANP methodology.