Sensitivity Analyses of
Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Terry Bahill
Systems and Industrial Engineering
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0020, USA
terry@sie.arizona.edu
http://www.sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/qfdSensit.ppt
© 1998-2004 Bahill

Quality function deployment (QFD) is used to document customer requirements and ensure that they are satisfied throughout the system life cycle. This talk will use sensitivity analyses to look at the robustness of QFD to changes in customer importance weights, the numeric values of the relationships, the ways users reduce the size of the QFD matrices, differences in defining the Hows and differences in team members. Results indicate that QFD is a very robust tool, which means that it is insensitive to most changes in the process. The most important aspect of the QFD tool is the distinction between Strong and Medium relationships. These results can help allocate resources during a QFD study. For this lecture I assume that the audience is experienced in using QFD.

Reference [62 and 73]. This lecture is suitable for engineers or the general public. This talk requires an overhead projector. This talk takes one hour.