Rating the Customer Requirements based on DEMATEL and Entropy

Abstract

In the configuration procedure of QFD ?Quality Function Deployment?, the importance rating of customer requirements as one of the important input parameters is very significant to the determination of the technical characteristics and even to the optimum decision to the whole quality of house as well as the following step of allocation decision-making. In this paper, firstly the drawbacks of the existing methods of determining the importance rating of customer requirements are analyzed. Then with the influence of customer requirement interdependence and market competitive evaluations sufficiently considered, DEMATEL is introduced to deal with self-correlations between customer requirements and Entropy is used to dispose the market competitive evaluations to modify the fundamental importance ratings of the customer requirements, thus a more objective comprehensive fundamental importance rating of the customer requirements can be gained. Finally, one example is given to verify the effectiveness of the presented method.