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J. R. SHARMA, INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY, NAGPUR A. M. RAWANI, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, RAIPUR
2007, ASQ
Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology used to achieve higher customer satisfaction. The engineering characteristics (ECs) affecting product performance are designed to match the customer requirements (CRs). Computing raw weights of CRs and priority scores of ECs from various input variables is one of the most critical phases in QFD application. This study deals with the most neglected and often-omitted part of the QFD processthe interrelationship matrix among customer requirements. This article presents a mathematical solution to the correlation triangle problem that incorporates both CRs and ECs. An attempt is made to address the issue by considering the impact of these interrelationships on the overall calculations, using weighted average method for the CR interrelationship value operator in order to prioritize customers requirements in QFD. The outcome of the study is a mathematical solution to the perennial correlation triangle problem in the form of a framework that factors in the correlation triangle values in conjunction with computed raw weights for customer requirements. The model fine tunes and adds precision to an otherwise qualitative strategic decision process. The applicability of the authors proposed model is demonstrated with a real-life example. Key words: customer requirements, interrelationship values, prioritization, QFD
INTRODUCTION
In any kind of project, the design team needs to create, improvise, innovate, or improve a product by incorporating the customer requirements (CRs) and engineering characteristics (ECs) recognized in the quality function deployment (QFD) planning process into a product. A design team needs to make tradeoffs while selecting the CRs and ECs based on the order of their relative raw weights and priority scores and their ranking to achieve total customer satisfaction without violating the time, money, and effort constraints. The technical priority score and their rankings are the key results of QFD, since they guide the design team in decision making, resource allocation, and the subsequent product analyses. Therefore, deriving the final importance rankings of CRs and ECs from input variables is a crucial step toward successful QFD. The inherent abstraction and the inexactness of the result, however, presents a special challenge in effectively calculating the customer raw weights and technical priority scores and, hence, the importance rankings of CRs and ECs. The aim of this article is to advance the theory and practice of incorporating and factoring in the interrelationship values of the house of quality (HoQ). Implementation of this improvised approach to comprehensive matrix analysis is discussed from the perspective of a product by conducting a hypothetical analysis.
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CR triangle
Relationship room
product or service. The most common approach is to ask: Who must be satisfied with the product for it to be considered successful? Identifying the CRs and their importance remains one of the most serious obstacles to a successful QFD application in product development.
CR Triangle
The CR correlation triangle is designed to show the interrelationship between the CRs of the matrix. Tradeoffs between the different CRs are identified and captured as strong positive, positive, negative, and strong negative. If two CRs help each other move in their desired direction, they are considered to be positively related. Similarly, if moving in the desired direction on one CR has a detrimental effect on another, they are considered to be negatively related. Since they are generally not used in calculation, the interrelationship data are defined with symbols for associated relationships.
QFD FRAMEWORK
In the QFD approach, the matrix to be built is the product planning matrix. It also is called the house of quality (HoQ) because of its house-like shape. Its purpose is to translate important customer requirements regarding product quality into key end-product control characteristics. The HoQ comprises several different parts or rooms, which are sequentially filled in order to achieve an actionable translation from requirements into characteristics (see Figure 1).
Voice of Customer
The HoQs first room concerns the product and deals with the definition of the selected product for which QFD is constructed. The second room concerns the VOC, but before this there is a need to identify the customers. There are different ways to identify the customers of a
Relationship Room
The Relationship Room is the core of the HoQwhere the relationship between each CR (VOC) and the ECs (voice of the engineer), as well as their intensity, is depicted. The relationship between CRs and ECs might be achieved by asking, To what degree does this engineering characteristic predict the customers satisfaction with this requirement? Based on in-house expertise, surveys, data from statistical studies, and controlled experiments, the team seeks consensus as to how much each EC affects each CR. This task is widely recognized as highly complex and represents another critical stage in the HoQ building process.
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i=1
Yes
If j i No
j=j+1
If j n No i=i+1
Yes
an approach based on the application of possibility theory and fuzzy arithmetic to address the vagueness in QFD operation. Fung, Popplewell, and Xie (1998) developed a hybrid system to incorporate the principles of QFD, analytical hierarchy progress, and fuzzy set theory for customer requirements analysis and product attribute targets determination. Shen, Tan, and Xie (2001) proposed a fuzzy procedure to examine the sensitivity of ranking different parameters to the defuzzification strategy and degree of fuzziness of fuzzy numbers. Vangeas and Labib (2001) proposed a model for deriving optimum targets of CRs and ECs through the implementation of the fuzzy weighted average. On the similar lines, new methods for rating CRs and ECs in fuzzy QFD is proposed by integrating fuzzy weighted average method (Kao and Liu 2001) and the fuzzy expected value operator (Liu and Liu 2002). Karsak, Sozer, and Alptekin (2002) combined the AHP and goal programming approach for determining the priority levels of CRs. Han, Kim, and Choi (2004) suggested a linear partial ordering approach for prioritizing ECs in QFD with incomplete information. Karsak (2004) used the fuzzy multiple objective programming framework for prioritization in QFD. Chen, Fung, and Tang (2005) proposed a ranking model using the weighted average method in the fuzzy expected value operator in fuzzy QFD.
If i n
STOP
A few approaches have been introduced for determining CRs and ECs importance rating in the QFD process. The noticeable ones found in the QFD literature dealing with prioritization are mentioned here: The prioritization that is consistent with CRs importance ratings was advocated by Lyman (1990) through the concept of deployment normalization. Armacost et al. (1994) used the analytic hierarchical process to prioritize CRs and ECs in an industrialized housing application. Khoo and Ho (1996) proposed
+ + Leakage factor (air/liquid) + ++ + + ++ Right size/Correct volume + ++ Proper visible markings Precise movement ++ Safe convenient packaging Tamper proof (no reuse)
The rationale behind the devised formulae is the relative direction and the magnitude of change that one CR causes on to the other, depicted with the help of synergistic or detrimental symbols. If there is a synergistic (or detrimental) relationship between two CRs, the effect is positive (or negative). This causes CRs to move in the right (or opposite) direction, the intensity of which is decided by the nature of relationship, that is, strong or weak. The net effect is to increase (that is, multiplying factor > 1.00) or decrease (that is, multiplying factor < 1.00) the considered CRs weight by the related percentage value of other related CRs, thus taking into account the assigned degree and direction of association. A Visual Basic Code has been written for the proposed method. A flowchart for the same is shown in Figure 2.
AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
After going through all QFD steps depicted previously in the basic building blocks for the selected healthcare product syringe and needle, the calculated raw weights for each CR are shown next. The matrix ignores redundant steps and considers only the relevant ones, that is, CR, interrelationship among CRs, raw weights, normalized raw weights, and their ranks, as shown in Figure 3. The sample calculation (of CR2) shown next helps in deciphering how changes in the correlation triangle value get reflected in IRW and finally in FRW, thus affecting the resultant rankings of the CRs.
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No Leakages (Air/Fluid)
CR
Cleanliness & purity Safe, reliable, & efficient Ease of handling & use Cost of the product No leakages (Air/Fluid) Right size/ Correct vol. Proper markings Precise movements Safe packaging Tamper proof (No reuse)
Precise Movements
Proper Markings
PRW NPRW
69 72 0.1076 0.1123
IRW
0.6217 1.1367
NIRW
0.1046 0.1912
FRW
67.03 122.54
1.25
1.25
0 0
0.50 0.25
0 1.25
0 1.25
0 1.25
0 0
1.25 1.50
1.25 1.50
0 0 0 1.25 1.25 0 0
0 0.50 0 0 0 0 1.50
0 0.25 0 0 0 0 1.50
SUM
40 86 59 63 42 47 67 96
641
Considering row no. 2 (CR2: safe, reliable, and efficient) PRW2 = 72.00 (Old rank is 3) NPRW2 = 72.00 / 641.00 = 0.1123 X2j = {0.00, , 0.00, 0.25, 1.25, 1.25, 1.25, 0.00, 1.50, 1.50} SPRW = 641.00 IRW2 = NPRW2 + { [NPRW2 * (1 + NPRWj ) * X2j ]} =
j=1 n
Similarly, values of IRW for all other CRs are computed. SIRW = 5.9455 NIRW2 = IRW2 / SIRW = 1.1367 / 5.9455 = 0.1912 FRW2 = NIRW2 * SPRW = 0.1912 * 641.00 = 122.5449 (New rank is 1) Similarly, values of FRW for all other CRs are computed (see Table 1).
0.1123 + {0 + 0 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.1342) * 0.25 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.0920) * 1.25 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.0983) * 1.25 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.0655) * 1.25 + 0 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.1045) * 1.50 + 0.1123 * (1 + 0.1498) * 1.50} = 1.1367
RESULTS
Results can be deciphered from the comparative analysis of CRs raw weights and their ranking (see Table 2). The old traditional method and the resulting
PRW
96 86 72 69 67 63 59 47 42 40
NPRW
0.1498 0.1342 0.1123 0.1076 0.1045 0.0983 0.0920 0.0733 0.0655 0.0624
Rank
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X
C R (Proposed Method)
Safe, reliable, and efficient Tamper proof (no reuse) Safe & convenient packaging Cleanliness and purity Cost of the product Right size/Correct volume No leakages (Air/Fluid) Proper markings Precise movements Ease of handling and use
FRW
122.5449 96.7727 71.4992 67.0252 66.0727 62.7384 56.2857 41.9110 31.4355 24.7148
NIRW
0.1912 0.1510 0.1115 0.1046 0.1031 0.0979 0.0878 0.0654 0.0490 0.0386
Rank
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X
2007, ASQ
rankings leave a lot to be desired. However, this lacuna gets solved with the computation of the final raw weight obtained through CR correlation triangle values. The final raw weights, their rankings, and their order are much more precise and accurate, leading to better and informative decision making by product designers.
CONCLUSIONS
The prioritization and the judicious selection of CRs from the markets perspective is a complex task and needs special attention. Over the past few years, there has been an huge effort in establishing a decision framework that quantifies the imprecise and subjective customer information inherent in the product planning process. This research has proposed a novel QFD approach that solves some methodological problems encountered in the conventional QFD. While the conventional approach uses only symbols to express the strength or weakness of the relationships among CRs, albeit only in few cases, the new approach addresses relationships in a different and improved numerical method. The article shows the effectiveness and preciseness of the proposed model. Numbers are used to represent the imprecise nature of the judgments and to define
more appropriately the relationships among CRs. The model is shown to be computationally feasible for realistic problems and outperforms traditional approaches on the basis of being relatively straight forward and simplified. A systematic algorithm for calculating the critical targets of CRs is followed. The framework presented in this article for prioritizing CRs extends the single objective viewpoint of maximizing customer satisfaction by considering the companys other market-related objectives, and thus, precludes an unreasonable QFD planning in practice. The proposed methodology provides product developers, designers, and engineers with an objective method for making a judicious selection of critical CRs satisfying the overall CRs. The illustrated example clearly shows that the proposed approach can produce more informative results, adding credibility to the outcome and its analysis, for the benefit of the product designers and developers.
REFERENCES
Akao, Y. 1990. Quality function deployment: Integrating customer requirements into product design , Cambridge, Mass.: Productivity Press. Armacost, R., P. Componation, M. Mullens, and W. Swart. 1994. AHP framework for prioritizing customer requirement in QFD: An industrialized housing application. IIE Transactions 26, no. 4: 72-79.
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