A Two-Stage Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment Model for Service Design

Over the past decades, a great interest of quality function deployment (QFD) application has shift from industrial product to service sector. However, most previous studies focus on the first-phase of QFD or multi-phase model in service design, which is incomplete and not systematic. Moreover, the inherent vagueness or impreciseness in QFD presents a special challenge to the effective results. Toward this end, this paper tries to propose a two-phase fuzzy QFD model for service industry based on the theory of strategic, tactical and operational (STO). By this, on one hand, our proposed model can deal with the ill-defined nature of the linguistic judgments. On the other hand, it divides the decision and plan process into three correlated level, strategic, tactical and operational. In particular, this paper addresses detailed implementation procedures of the two-phase model, which can translate the customer needs (CNs) to service characteristics (SCs) to service process (SP) elements.