The management of customer requirements in a product-service system context. A case study in the medical equipment sector

The paper addresses the evaluation of customer requirements (CRs) in the implementation of services in a product-service system (PSS) context. The extension of services has expanded considerably, yet their correct combination with products is still problematic to manufacturers. Services are characterised by ambiguities and vagueness, hindering their effective implementation. Conventional product design tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) are limited when comprehending the intangibility of services and hence, evaluating and prioritising customer requirements. To address this topic, QFD is adapted to a service context through the integration of the fuzzy logic and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a means of reducing inaccuracies. The approach is applied to a case study in the medical field and its results are compared to the traditional QFD to analyse its outcomes and the effectiveness of the augmentations in increasing the usefulness of QFD in a PSS context.