Sensitivity of the relationship matrix in quality function deployment

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) adopts a customer-driven approach and pro vides a structural way to ensure that the final product or service meets cu stomer requirements. As the central part of the-house of quality (HOQ), the relationship matrix links customer attributes and technical responses thro ugh a two-dimensional diagram. As the weightage used is discrete in nature, the ranking of technical responses is sensitive to the scoring system. The technical priority guides QFD practitioners in making trade-offs for resou rce allocation and directs the downstream QFD activities. The stability of the technical priority values is, hence, important and desirable. To minimi ze the variability of technical priority, an optimization model is develope d and its optimal solution is employed as the scoring system in the calcula tion of the final technical importance, Two examples are presented to illus trate the use of the model. Some implementation issues relating to the prop osed approach are also discussed.