Application of fuzzy QFD for enabling leanness in a manufacturing organisation

Increasing global competition is forcing manufacturing organisations to transform their manufacturing pattern from mass manufacturing to lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing is focussed on the elimination of waste thereby enabling cost reduction. Quality management is an important aspect associated with lean practices. Modern customers are gaining importance and their voice needs to be accurately translated into technical languages. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a technique extensively used for this purpose. In order to cope with the vagueness associated with relationships and correlations in QFD, fuzzy numbers are integrated with a QFD framework and fuzzy QFD is used in this project. A case study is carried out in an Indian electronics switches manufacturing organisation. The approach is very effective in the identification of lean competitive bases, lean decision domains, lean attributes and lean enablers for the organisation. The case study results are practically validated which indicate the receptivity of this approach in the industrial scenario.