No abstract

Responding to customer needs is important for business success. Quality function deployment provides systematic procedures for converting customer needs into technical requirements to ensure maximum customer satisfaction. The existing literature mainly focuses on the achievement of maximum customer satisfaction under a budgetary limit via mathematical models. The market goal of the new product for the target market segment is usually ignored. In this study, the proposed approach thus considers the target customer satisfaction degree for the target market segment in the model by formulating the overall customer satisfaction as a function of the quality level. In addition, the proposed approach emphasizes the cost-effectiveness concept in the design stage via the achievement of the target customer satisfaction degree using the minimal total cost. A numerical example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach and its characteristics are discussed.