Strategic management of logistics service: a fuzzy QFD approach

Logistics and Supply Chain Management literature indicates that customer service management has become a strategic issue for companies in the new millennium. By improving logistics performances, companies increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. The aim of this paper is to propose an original approach for the management of customer service. The approach is based on the quality function deployment (QFD), a methodology which has been successfully adopted in new products development. Specifically, the paper addresses the issue of how to deploy the house of quality (HOQ) to effectively and efficiently improve logistics processes and thus customer satisfaction. Fuzzy logic is also adopted to deal with the ill-defined nature of the qualitative linguistic judgments required in the proposed HOQ. The methodology has been tested by means of a real case application, which refers to an Italian company operating in the mechanical industry.