Establishing Links
This stage involves filling in the Relationships Matrix in the main body of the chart
and the triangular Conflicts Matrix at the top of the chart. The idea is to highlight
relationships between Customer Requirements and Engineering Characteristics,
and conflict/supporting relationships amongst the Engineering Characteristics. In
addition to highlighting the relationships their relative strengths must also be
judged and a range of symbols is used to represent this.
Relationships Matrix
This matrix highlights the relationships between the Customer Requirements and
the Engineering Characteristics. It must also be remembered to include the
Technical and Regulatory Requirements in the correlation.
The team members should seek consensus on these evaluations, basing them on
expert engineering experience, customer responses and data from statistical studies
and controlled experiments.
There will be varying degrees of the strength of the relationships and so a set of
symbols is used to identify the significance.
The symbols used are: