Ranking factors involved in product design using a hybrid model of Quality Function Deployment, Data Envelopment Analysis and TOPSIS technique

Quality function deployment (QFD) is one such extremely important quality management tool, which is useful in product design and development. Traditionally, QFD rates the design requirements (DRs) with respect to customer requirements, and aggregates the rating to get relative importance score of DRs. An increasing number of studies emphasize on the need to incorporate additional factors, such as cost and environmental impact, while calculating the relative importance of DRs. However, there are different methodologies for driving the relative importance of DRs, when several additional factors are considered. TOPSIS (technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solution) is suggested for the purpose of the research. This research proposes new approach of TOPSIS for considering the rating of DRs with respect to CRs, and several additional factors, simultaneously. Proposed method is illustrated using by step-by-step procedure. The proposed methodology was applied for the Sanam Electronic Company in Iran.