An approach for manufacturing strategy development based on fuzzy-QFD

Today most research related to manufacturing strategy development concentrates on descriptive processes and conceptual models, and therefore lacks the capability of assessing the supportive degree of manufacturing strategy to competitive priorities, and is also difficult to assess the congruence among various decisions of the manufacturing strategy. This paper proposes an approach for manufacturing strategy development based on quality function deployment (QFD). The study starts by analyzing the process of manufacturing strategy development and the features of QFD. Thereafter, a methodology related to manufacturing strategy development based on QFD is developed, which comprises two stages and eleven steps. This approach uses QFD as a transforming device to link competitive factors with manufacturing decision categories such as structural decision categories and infrastructural categories, and uses QFD as a main tool in different stages of manufacturing strategy development process. This paper also integrates fuzzy set theory and house of quality (HOQ) in order to provide a structural tool to capture the inherent imprecision and vagueness of decision-relevant inputs and to facilitate the analysis of decision-relevant QFD information. A case is given to illustrate the utilization of the proposed approach at the end of this paper.