Maximizing customer satisfaction by optimal specification of engineering characteristics

The House of Quality has been widely discussed as a mechanism for converting customer attributes into engineering characteristics to ensure the design quality of new products and processes. In the past, this process has been subjective and heuristic. In this paper, we present a mathematical programming model for determining the optimal settings for engineering characteristics based on value functions constructed to capture customer preferences. The model can be used with either traditional subjective measures of customer preference or incorporate empirical models based on quantitative data. The robustness of the optimal solution to randomness in parameter estimates is investigated. An example is used to demonstrate the procedure.