Title: Engineering characteristics prioritisation in QFD using ordinal scales: a robustness analysis

Authors: Maurizio Galetto; Fiorenzo Franceschini; Domenico A. Maisano; Luca Mastrogiacomo

Addresses: DIGEP – Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy ' DIGEP – Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy ' DIGEP – Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy ' DIGEP – Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy

Abstract: Quality function deployment (QFD) is a management tool used for the design of new products/services and the related production/supply processes. One of the goals of the method is to translate the customer requirements (CRs) into measurable engineering characteristics (ECs) of the new product/service and prioritise them, basing on their relationships with CRs and the related importances. To this purpose, the current scientific literature encompasses several alternative approaches (the most used is the independent scoring method - ISM), in most of which cardinal properties are arbitrarily attributed to data collected on ordinal scales. This paper describes and discusses a new approach based on ME-MCDM (multi expert/multiple criteria decision making) techniques, which do not require any debatable ordinal to cardinal conversion. The theoretical principles and the robustness of the method are presented and tested through some application examples related to a well-known case study reported in the scientific literature. [Received 5 May 2015; Revised 7 November 2017; Accepted 9 November 2017]

Keywords: quality function deployment; QFD; ordinal scale; independent scoring method; ISM; MCDM operators.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2018.090617

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2018 Vol.12 No.2, pp.151 - 174

Published online: 23 Mar 2018 *

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