Quality Function Development based Mathematical Models Considering the Target Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an important factor related to quality performance Catering to customer needs is one of the important ways to boost customer satisfaction in competitive markets Among numerous quality design/improvement techniques the concept of quality function deployment (QFD) is made customer orientation-based by providing logical processes converting customer needs into technical responses to ensure customer satisfaction The existing QFD-related literature using quantitative approaches mainly emphasizes the viewpoint of resource limitation by achieving maximum customer satisfaction under a budgetary limit via mathematical models However from a marketing perspective determining a method by which to afford adequate competitive advantage by developing target customer satisfaction for a newly designed product has seldom been addressed Hence this study is intended to develop new mathematical approaches to implement this market perspective The developed approaches are based on Kano’s satisfaction concept (1984) as well as Anderson and Sullivan’s satisfaction concept (1993) respectively Thus under the premise of considering target customer satisfaction for a target market segment we develop mathematical programming models by formulating the degree of target customer satisfaction as a required constraint In addition during the developing of the mathematical models we find that a widely applied procedure for information integration the Wasserman normalization model (1993) is deficient and irrational for use in general applications Hence we also extend the purpose of this study to improving the weaknesses of the Wasserman normalization model Numerical examples are illustrated to show the applicability of the improved normalization models and the proposed mathematical models according to the different design concepts A numerical comparison is also provides to investigate the design performance

Date of Award	2015 May 20
Original language	English
Supervisor	Liang-Hsuan Chen (Supervisor)