Orthogonal Experiment Method of Determining Functional Relationships in Quality Function Deployment

The determination of the relation functions between customer requirements and engineering characteristics is the key to the QFD planning.To overcome the difficulty of acquiring enough data,an orthogonal experiment method is presented.With the engineering characteristics as influential factors and customer requirements as appraisal indexes,the determination of the relation functions can be regarded as a multi-factor and multi-index experiment design.The relational degree between each customer requirement and each engineering characteristic can be determined by the P-value of the analysis of variance,and the coefficients of the relationship function can be got by the contribution rates to variance.Finally,a case study of developing an automatic washing machine illustrates that satisfactory results can be reached with less data.