Sensitivity analysis of relative worth in empirical and simulation-based QFD matrices

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the most popular design tools used in product development. One of the objectives of QFD is to map customer requirements to product requirements and calculate their relative worth. A product requirement with a large relative worth indicates that it is an important product requirement in satisfying customer requirements. QFD applications use various rating scales in quantifying the degree of mapping from customer requirements to product requirements and various worth calculation methods to calculate the relative worth. The purpose of this paper is to study the sensitivity of relative worth when different rating scales or worth calculation methods are used. We identified two representative rating scales and two worth calculation methods in QFD matrices published in conference and journal papers (empirical QFD matrices), and used these rating scales and worth calculation methods to study sensitivity of relative worth. Sensitivities of relative worth in empirical QFD matrices and in simulation-generated QFD matrices are compared for validations --Abstract, page iii