An integrated approach to innovative product development using fuzzy logic, kano model and quality function deployment

Abstract

In today’s competitive market, customer satisfaction is a key factor for the success of the companies. Quality fucntion depolyment (QFD) is a customer oriented approach that translates customer requirements into suitable technical requirements for each stage of product and service development. However, merely listening to the voice of customers (VOC) is not enough. Integration of Kano Model with QFD goes beyond the voice of customer and provides a better approach to achieve total customer satisfaction. Kano Model introduces innovative attributes which customers are unaware. However, the transformation functions used to adjust improvement ratio in traditional Kano- QFD models have some deficiencies. In addition, the calculation of the sales points of QFD by the companies themselves is a biased approach. This study presents two new approaches to optimize product quality by overcoming these deficiencies in the existing approaches: (i) Modified Kano-quality function deployment (MKQFD), and (ii) fuzzy kano-fuzzy QFD (FKFQFD). One of the main improvements of the first proposed model provides is the calculations of sales points according to the results of Kano Questionnaire (customer ratings). The second proposed model applies fuzzy logic to the MKQFD by representing sales points, importance of customer expectations, and relationships of engineering specifications and customer expectations, which are originally fuzzy statements, by fuzzy membership functions. An example is presented to illustrate the proposed approaches.