Using OWA aggregation technique in QFD: a case study in education in a textile engineering department

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a systematic approach that considers customer needs through design, production, marketing, and support stages. Customer needs are the main input for QFD, so voice of customer must be understood well and changes, innovations, and treatments must be held in this view. In QFD applications, determining the priorities of customer needs is a fairly important stage. This is mostly held by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) a multicriteria decision making technique. Nonetheless, Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) is an aggregation technique mostly used in decision making for multicriteria decision problems. So, combining these two techniques will give a different viewpoint for prioritizing the customer needs in QFD applications. The aim of this study is to show the use of Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) aggregation technique in QFD applications. For this purpose a case study in Dokuz Eylul University Textile Engineering Department was held. It was aimed to support the efforts on increasing the education quality by determining the students' needs and opinions using QFD with OWA.