An integrating framework for prioritising tasks in designing management system improvement projects

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely used method in several fields such as product design, manufacturing process design, and project development. House of quality (HOQ) is one of the manipulation tools for QFD and it can convert customer requirements (CRs) into the design parameters (DPs) of a firm. However, the consideration of correlation among DPs is often ignored in most QFD application-related research. This may affect the implementation sequence of the project tasks, and results in a delay or queuing of product design/project development. The proposed framework integrates QFD and design structure matrix (DSM) to convert CRs into DPs, and subsequently prioritise tasks for properly deploying the project and shortening the completion time of the project. Finally, an empirical case, improvement on hazardous substance process management, is illustrated to demonstrate the proposed methodology. [Received 14 December 2010; Revised 10 April 2011; Revised 25 May 2012; Revised 3 October 2012; Accepted 5 February 2013]