Integrating QFD for product-service systems with the Kano model and fuzzy AHP

Abstract

The paper proposes a systematic procedure for the development of Product-Service Systems (PSSs) by focusing on the analysis of customer requirements, and the selection of those that can practically enhance the offerings' value. With this goal in mind, the Quality Function Deployment for Product Service Systems (QFDforPSS) method was augmented by means of the Kano model to filter the customers' needs and transform the attractive ones into Receiver State Parameters (RSPs), as the cornerstone of QFDforPSS. Then, to properly assess these parameters and their inherent uncertainty, the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method was also integrated into the procedure. To validate the proposed procedure, it was implemented in a case study in the medical devices sector, in collaboration with a haemodialysis equipment manufacturer, which operates in a regulated market of product-oriented services.

Evaluating the Environmental Performance of a Product/Service-System Business Model for Merino Wool Next-to-Skin Garments: The Case of Armadillo Merino®

“…In addition, the design of the business model could also benefit by taking into account customer requirements, especially as the proposed PSS model would be operating on a regulated market (such as Defence), where the customer (MoD) need to operate following public procurement rules, and it is more difficult for the end user (MoD personnel) to make purchasing decisions [69]. To minimise the impact of the PSS to the current procurement system that the MoD follows, it was suggested that the PSS used the current freight system.…”

Group multigranular linguistic QFD for prioritizing service designs with combined weighting method

“…To deal with the heterogeneity of DMs, AHP (Jia, Liu, Lin, Qiu, & Tan, ), Bodily's updated method (Wang, Fung, Li, & Pu, ), and fuzzy majority‐based method (Yan & Ma, ) have been developed to assign importance weights to each DM. To obtain the basic weights of ECs, objective weighting methods such as MDM (Li & He, ) and entropy‐based method (Li, Du, & Chin, ), subjective weighting methods such as AHP (Haber et al, ), analytic network process (Asadabadi, ), and BWM (Huang et al, ) have been widely used. Moreover, some researchers have viewed prioritizing the final importance ratings of ECs as a form of multicriteria decision‐making (MCDM).…”

“…In recent decades, QFD has been evolved as a powerful technique that assists developers in designing and developing products or services (Chan & Wu, ). Considerable researchers improved the traditional QFD by integrating with fuzzy set theory to enhance the performance of QFD (Akkawuttiwanich & Yenradee, ; Babbar & Amin, ; Haber, Fargnoli, & Sakao, ). Fuzzy linguistic methods have been applied to measure tourists' judgements to service innovation design, but their inefficient calculations were often criticized when facing vast numbers of tourists' judgements (Gomezelj, ).…”

“…Moreover, weights are usually assigned to each DM before obtaining the overall values of DMs in existing research, which is criticized for subjective randomness. Besides, subjective weight assignment methods, such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP), are widely used in QFD (Haber et al, ; Hsu, Chang, & Luo, ). Rezaei () revealed that AHP requires numerous pairwise comparisons, which easily leads to inconsistency.…”

The Impact of Human Error in the Use of Agricultural Tractors: A Case Study Research in Vineyard Cultivation in Italy

“…In more detail, HoQ links customer needs and expectations (the Customer Requirements (CRs)) to appropriate technical attributes (the Engineering Characteristics (ECs)) by means of a 1-3-9 score, where 1 represents a low relationship, 3 a medium relationship, and 9 a strong relationship (while a null value means no-relationship), as schematized in Figure 3. The final output is represented by the weight of ECs, as well as their relative (normalized) weight; this consequently provides grounds for their assessment and prioritization [69]. It is worth noting that in traditional HoQ, the importance level of CRs is expressed by means of a score from 1 (low importance) to 5 (high importance).…”