Selection effective management tools on setting European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) model by a quality function deployment (QFD) approach

EFQM Excellence model literature indicates that using the management tools that are relevant to the organization’s needs has become a strategic issue for companies in today’s competitive environment. By choosing and applying the best management tools among too many management tools, companies can improve their performances and then increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. The aim of this research is to propose an original approach for the management tools selection based on the quality function deployment (QFD) approach, a methodology which has been successfully adopted in new products development. Specifically, the research addresses the issue of how to deploy the house of quality (HOQ) to effectively and efficiently improve management tools selection processes and thus company satisfaction about its excellence achievement. Fuzzy logic is also adopted to deal with the vagueness nature of the qualitative linguistic judgments required in the proposed HOQ. The model of this research has been tested by means of a real case application, which refers to an Iranian company operating in the automotive industry in this case the mixture of 15 categories of management tools with five EFQM enabler criteria has been characterized by using of the research model. And also the test of the hypothesis of this research has been done by using spearman correlation coefficient.