QFD Customer-Requirement Prioritization based on the Law of Comparative Judgments

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured process to design and develop products/services that better fulfill customers' requirements (CRs). The initial collection and analysis of the CRs is particularly critical, as any distortion can propagate to the whole process results. The focus of this article is on the prioritization of CRs, which can be improved by introducing a new prioritization technique based on the Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment. The greatest strength of this technique is combining a refined theoretical model with a simple and user-friendly data collection process. The description is supported by a realistic application example.