Ambiguity in multicriteria quality decisions

Abstract

Quality is becoming an issue of increasing strategic importance in business. The aim of this paper is to analyze quality from a decision-making perspective. Quality decisions are characterized by their ambiguity while their evaluation uses a multicriteria viewpoint. Fuzzy decision theory provides a conceptual framework to model decisions with these features. It enables the decision maker to add his/her own experience and any other type of information to that obtained from hard figures. This theory is applied to a set of quality decision alternatives which are evaluated using different criteria such as their impact on fixed costs, cost of quality, leadtime and flexibility. The approach provided in this paper can be extended to other quality decisions