Ranking of customer requirements in a competitive environment

Quality function deployment (QFD) has been widely used to translate customer requirements to a product's technical attributes. Correctly rating the importance of every customer requirement is essential to the QFD process because it will largely affect the final target value of a product's technical attributes. This paper proposes a new customer requirements ranking method that considers competitors' information. In today's competitive environment, there are usually several products to fulfill certain functions. The success of a product depends not only on whether it meets the customer requirements, but also on how it compares with competitor products. Most previous methods focus only on the customer perspective, and ignore the competitive environment. The proposed method considers competition position, current performance and customers' viewpoint to produce the ratings. In addition, this method uses fuzzy mathematics instead of crisp numbers to capture the true customer requirements. Compared with previous methods, this method is more meaningful and provides companies with a way to find the best product design strategy. A numerical example is shown to illustrate the approach. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.