An ECI-based methodology for determining the final importance ratings of customer requirements in MP product improvement

Quality function deployment (QFD), as a customer-driven tool, 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. Correctly rating the final importance of CRs is essential to PPHOQ construction process because it will largely affect the target value of ECs for mature-period (MP) product improvement. To exploit competitive information of MP products, this paper is to develop a comprehensive and systematic methodology to rate the final importance of CRs for MP product improvement, on the basis of improved maximal deviation approach for dealing with the corporations’ performance estimations on CRs, and the integration of AHP and scale method for estimating the importance ratings of achieving the improvement targets of performance estimations of CRs. Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented method.