An integrated approach to innovative product development using fuzzy logic, kano model and quality function deployment

In today?s competitive market, customer satisfaction is a key factor for the successof the companies. Quality fucntion depolyment (QFD) is a customer oriented approachthat translates customer requirements into suitable technical requirements for eachstage of product and service development. However, merely listening to the voice ofcustomers (VOC) is not enough. Integration of Kano Model with QFD goes beyond thevoice of customer and provides a better approach to achieve total customer satisfaction.Kano Model introduces innovative attributes which customers are unaware. However,the transformation functions used to adjust improvement ratio in traditional Kano-QFD models have some deficiencies. In addition, the calculation of the sales pointsof QFD by the companies themselves is a biased approach. This study presents twonew approaches to optimize product quality by overcoming these deficiencies in theexisting approaches:(i) Modified Kano-quality function deployment (MKQFD), and(ii) fuzzy kano-fuzzy QFD (FKFQFD). One of the main improvements of the firstproposed model provides is the calculations of sales points according to the resultsof Kano Questionnaire (customer ratings). The second proposed model applies fuzzylogic to the MKQFD by representing sales points, importance of customer expectations,and relationships of engineering specifications and customer expectations, which areoriginally fuzzy statements, by fuzzy membership functions. An example is presentedto illustrate the proposed approaches.