An approach based on fuzzy logic, to improve quality management on research and development centers

Abstract

Nowadays, with globalization and with the development of emergent economies the Research and Development (R&D) Centres in Europe to survive need to achieve high levels of excellence. In this way, the use of a quality management tools, such as European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), can help the managers of such organizations to identify de best practices to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness. Hence, this paper presents a new approach to support managers of R&D centres in the decision-making process in achieving the aims mentioned above, which is based on the EFQM model integrated with Fuzzy Logic. The proposed approach was applied to a Portuguese R&D Centre to assess its overall performance. In order to evaluate the robustness of the proposed approach, the results achieved were compared with the results obtained through a traditional methodology based on RADAR’s Logic.