Improving Quality of Product and Process in the Manufacturing of Particleboard with an Integrated Quality Function Deployment Approach

Abstract

Quality Function Deployment (QFD), which provides customer-oriented product design, is a quality improvement tool that reflects customer requirements (CRs) to the technical characteristics (TCs) of product and production process. The importance rating of technical characteristics in conventional QFD is determined only by customer requirements, without considering company constraints. In determining whether the technical characteristics are effective for the company, QFD is used integrated with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In generating the relations in the House of Quality (HoQ), the linguistic expressions of the experts are converted into fuzzy numbers to provide flexibility to the model and to cope with uncertainty. The Fuzzy DEA-QFD method, which includes customer requirements as well as company constraints, has not been proposed. In this context, this chapter contributes to the relevant literature by means of developing an integrated QFD approach to determine the importance of technical characteristics based on both the customer service level and interests of the firm. The proposed model is applied in a company operating in the wood-based panel industry sector. The importance levels of customer requirements in HoQ are calculated by Goal Programming, which allows for the evaluation of different types of surveys simultaneously. The incorporation of Goal Programming, DEA and Fuzzy Logic to the proposed model shows that the QFD is an interdisciplinary method and its results are reliable owing to the mathematical model.