A combination of QFD and imprecise DEA with enhanced Russell graph measure: A case study in healthcare

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a proven tool for process and product development, which translates the voice of customer (VoC) into engineering characteristics (EC), and prioritizes the ECs, in terms of customer's requirements. Traditionally, QFD rates the design requirements (DRs) with respect to customer needs, and aggregates the ratings to get relative importance scores of DRs. An increasing number of studies stress on the need to incorporate additional factors, such as cost and environmental impact, while calculating the relative importance of DRs. However, there is a paucity of methodologies for deriving the relative importance of DRs when several additional factors are considered. Ramanathan and Yunfeng [43] proved that the relative importance values computed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) coincide with traditional QFD calculations when only the ratings of DRs with respect to customer needs are considered, and only one additional factor, namely cost, is considered. Also, Kamvysi et al. [27] discussed the combination of QFD with analytic hierarchy process–analytic network process (AHP–ANP) and DEAHP–DEANP methodologies to prioritize selection criteria in a service context. The objective of this paper is to propose a QFD–imprecise enhanced Russell graph measure (QFD–IERGM) for incorporating the criteria such as cost of services and implementation easiness in QFD. Proposed model is applied in an Iranian hospital.