A method for rating customer requirements' final importance in QFD based on quantitative KANO Model

Relationship between product or service performance and customer satisfaction is treated as linear in QFD (Quality Function Deployment). Under this premise, the final importance of customer requirements acquired in QFD always can hardly reflect the customer needs accurately, and the decision-supporting role of QFD is limited to some extent. In view of the advantages of Kano's model, some scholars recommended to integrate Kano's model into QFD to determinate the final importance of customer requirements. But there is still not a consensus on the integration method, because Kano's model is essentially a qualitative analysis method and Kano classification criteria are relatively subjective. Therefore, this article builds a quantitative Kano's model to realize the objective classification of customer requirements, and then proposes an approach based on this quantitative Kano's model to calculate the final importance of customer requirements in QFD. Finally, a case study is illustrated to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of the method.