A novel approach to prioritize customer requirements in QFD based on customer satisfaction function for customer-oriented product design

In the highly competitive marketplace, customer satisfaction is one of the critical success factors to many leading companies. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been regarded as a powerful customer-oriented design tool for developing new or improved products to achieve higher customer satisfaction by integrating various functions of an organization. In the QFD process, correctly rating the importance of customer requirements (CRs) is a crucial and essential step since it largely affects the target value setting of design requirements (DRs). This paper proposes a novel approach to prioritize CRs from the viewpoint of company’s competitiveness (i.e., competitive priority ratings). The key characteristic of proposed approach is to model the customer’s preference structure as the form of customer satisfaction function by combining the competitive benchmarking analysis with Kano’s analysis. Finally, the proposed approach is illustrated with a numerical example of car door design problem.