An Approach to Dealing with Importance Weights of Customer Needs and Customer Dissatisfaction in Quality Function Deployment Optimization

This paper explains about the necessity of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) optimization model due to the absence of the formal methodology in QFD for allocating the available product development resource to determine the best possible product specifications. The proposed optimization model also deals with the improper handling of customer need’s importance weight and customer’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction feeling in the QFD process.QFD assumes that the customer need’s importance value is equivalent with the satisfaction level perceived by the customer when the need is met. However, most of the time, a fulfillment of an extremely important customer need does not lead to any improvement in customer satisfaction.QFD also considers that customer satisfaction level will increase automatically as the customer dissatisfaction sources are eliminated. This is not always true, since the sources of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not always the same. Thus, fulfilling a certain customer need to improve customer satisfaction does not automatically reduce the customer dissatisfaction, and vice versa. In order to explain the effect of the customer needs fulfillment on customer satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction, Kano’s model is used. A pencil design example is also presented in the paper. Using Kano’s model in QFD optimization helps to distribute the available product development resource in an effective way to increase the customer satisfaction and to reduce the customer dissatisfaction.