Question

Puritan-Bennett is a manufacturer of medical test equipment. In the early 1990s, its PB900A spirometer (equipment to measure lung capacity) was rapidly losing market share to a competitor’s product, which was simpler and half its price. Puritan-Bennett decided to use Quality Function Deployment to redesign PB900A. It surveyed its customers (pulmonologists, allergists, and nurses) to identify customer needs. A total of 26 customer needs were identified. Here, we will consider a small subset of the customer needs. The following customer needs were most important (importance in brackets): product is affordable (150), provides accurate readings (100), eliminates technician (administrator) variability (140), is easy to operate (130), and is sanitary (108).

Complete the following relationship matrix by determining the importance score for technical requirements (product specifications). Which is the most important technical requirement?

		Technical requirements (specifications)
Customer requirements	Importance	Price	Accuracy	Variability	Steps required	Mouthpiece
Product is affordable	150	⊙
Provides accurate reading	100		⊙	◯
Eliminate Tech. variability	140			⊙
Easy to operate	130				⊙	▽
Sanitary	108					⊙
Technical Requirements Importance		?	?	?	?	?
Target Values		2500	±3%	±5%	2	Replaceable
Strong	⊙          9
Medium	◯          3
Weak	▽           1

Answer 1

Given that the relationship matrix and also a given score for relation as

strong	9
Medium	O 3
Weak

From given information we complete the relationship matrix as

		Technical	requirements	(specifications)
customer requirements	Importance	Price	Accuracy	Variability	Steps required	Mouthpiece
Product is affordable	150
Provides accurate reading	100			O
Eliminate Tech. Variability	140
Easy to operate	130
Sanitary	108
Technical Requirements Importance		150*0.9 =135	100*0.9 = 90	100*0.3 + 140*0.9 = 156	130*0.9 =117	130*0.1 + 108*0.9 =110.2
Target values		2500	+-3%	+-5%	2	Replaceable

From above table we see that, Technical Requirements Importance for Variability is high as 156.So Variability is most important Technical Requirements.