A study of the sensitivity of "customer voice" in QFD analysis

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) using the method of House of Quality (HOQ ) is a qualitative tool to help the management incorporate customer require ments into the product and process development. In the analysis of HOQ, a s mall difference of the weights of the customer requirements may affect the result of the HOQ, which then influence subsequent outcomes such as the pri oritization and allocation of resources. On the other hand, it is usually d ifficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate information about the custo mer needs. In this paper, a more formal study is carried out to examine the sensitivity related to customer needs. The Analytic Hierarchy Process meth od (AHP) is used to obtain the relative importance of the customer voice. A n example is presented to illustrate how to conduct a sensitivity analysis. In general, the ranking is not sensitive to customer voice as the discrete weightage used for the correlation matrix.