A fuzzy QFD approach to achieve agility

In modern business environments, agility is advocated as the fundamental characteristics for competitiveness. Little research, however, exists which provides integrated methodologies suitable to be practically adopted to enhance agility of companies. This paper presents an original approach, which, by linking competitive bases, agile attributes and agile enablers, aims at identifying the most appropriate enablers to be implemented by companies starting from competitive characteristics of the related market. The approach is based on the quality function deployment (QFD) methodology, and, in particular, on the house of quality (HOQ), which has been successfully adopted in the new product development field. The whole scaffold exploits fuzzy logic, to translate linguistics judgements required for relationships and correlations matrixes into numerical values. An illustrative example, grounded on data available in literature, is proposed and discussed to show the application of the tool developed. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.