CUSTOMER DRIVEN QUALITY IMPROVEMENT OF A SPECIFIC PRODUCT THROUGH AHP AND ENTROPY BASED QFD: A CASE STUDY

Understanding the voice of the customers (VOCs) and properly incorporating their preferences and perceptions into the conceptual design process is the core step of customer-driven product development. To improve customer satisfaction and market profitability, the design team should have a customer-driven quality management and product development system. Quality function deployment (QFD) is an important customer-driven quality management tool that helps identify customer requirements and translate them into proper technical measures. This paper focuses on the application of the AHP and an entropy-based QFD approach on a manufacturing company to improve the quality of its product (blender) and determine the priorities for further improvement. The paper shows how customer requirements can be identified and applied to prioritize the design requirements for improving the quality of a blender. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is integrated to determine the final importance of the weights of the customer needs, and entropy is used to determine the set of priority ratings. This integrated framework can help achieve an effective evaluation of the final design solution for product development by overcoming the pitfalls of the traditional QFD approach. An application in a Bangladeshi company that produces blenders is presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.