New competitive priority rating method of customer requirements for customer-oriented product design

Quality function deployment (QFD) has gained extensive international support as one of the powerful techniques to achieve higher customer satisfaction. In the QFD, correctly rating the final importance of customer requirements (CRs) is a crucial and essential process since it largely affects the target value setting of design requirements (DRs). The final importance ratings of CRs are generally determined by combining relative importance ratings (RIRs) and competitive priority ratings (CPRs). This paper proposes a new method to obtain the CPRs of CRs during the QFD process. The proposed CPR method constructs the customer satisfaction model based on the competitive benchmarking analysis and then evaluates the performance quality of company product using the author’s satisfaction and uncertainty measure. Furthermore, the CPR method is integrated with the Kano’s model to capture the different impacts of CRs on customer satisfaction. Finally, the proposed CPR method is illustrated with a numerical example of car door design problem.