Improving quality of production and process in the manufacturing of particle board with an integrated quality function deployment approach

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) technique is a quality improvement tool that reflects customer needs and requirements to product and production process. The importance rating of technical characteristics in traditional QFD is determined only by customer requirements (CR), without taking into account such factors as technical cost, environmental impact, ease of implementation, worker effect. In this study, unlike the literature, the importance rating of technical characteristics (TC) were determined based on the principle not only to meet customer satisfaction levels but also to comply with company interests and the proposed multidimensional model has been implemented in a firm operating in the forest industry. Different types of questionnaires were created according to the customer structure in the House of Quality and the importance ratings of customer requirements were calculated by Goal Programming (GP). Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is integrated with QFD in terms of whether the TCs are effective for the firm. The linguistic expressions of experts in the construction of relations in the House of Quality were transformed into fuzzy numbers. The use of GP, DEA and fuzzy logic in the proposed model shows that QFD is an interdisciplinary method. Method is also reliable and realistic because its results come from a numerical basis.