Estimating the final priority ratings of engineering characteristics in mature-period product improvement by MDBA and AHP

Quality function deployment (QFD) has been widely used to translate customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) in product improvement. Product planning house of quality (PPHOQ) is of fundamental and strategic importance in the QFD system. In the construction process of the PPHOQ of mature-period (MP) product, correctly estimating the final priority ratings of ECs is essential, because it will largely affect the target value of ECs for improvement. To exploit competitive information of MP products, this paper develops a comprehensive and systematic methodology to rate the final priority of ECs for MP product improvement. The proposed method is on the basis of maximal deviation based approach (MDBA) for dealing with the corporations performance estimations of ECs, and it integrates AHP and scale method for analyzing the priority rating of achieving the improvement goal of performance evaluation (IGPE) of each EC. Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.