A scientific basis for the choice of scale in QFD Online publication date: Wed, 05-Apr-2006
by Solomani Coulibaly, Zhongsheng Hua
International Journal of Services and Operations Management (IJSOM), Vol. 2, No. 2, 2006
Abstract: In the quality function deployment (QFD) process, prioritising engineering characteristics is of fundamental importance, because it significantly affects the customer's satisfaction. The house of quality (HOQ) is usually used to this end. Generally, in HOQ the relationships between customer needs and engineering characteristics are defined using linguistic variables (weak, medium and strong), characterised by various scales such as 1-3-9, 1-3-5, etc. However, priority rank reversing may occur when different scales are employed. By taking fuzzy ranking as the reference, this paper tries to determine which one of the different scales give the most reliable prioritisation of design requirements. For that a sample of 10 HOQs is randomly selected from the QFD literature, and the ranking results of the various scales are compared with the one obtained from the fuzzy method. The results showed that the 1-3-5 scale give the closest ranking order to the one given by the fuzzy method.
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