Fostering product development using combination of QFD and ANP: A case study

In this ever changing business scenario, success of the company lies in understanding the customer preferences, tastes and anticipating the changes required in existing or new products being offered. It was desired to develop a model which allows decision makers to decompose a complex problem in a hierarchical structure to show the relationship of the goals, objectives, criteria and alternatives. The paper contributes a method for evaluation and analysis of customer as well as technical data using a synergistic combination of techniques like analytical network process (ANP) with quality function deployment (QFD) to evaluate most satisfying design for customers. A case study for the development of cars has been presented here to illustrate and validate the proposed approach. This study has been performed for the assessment of strategies to synthesize qualitative and quantitative factors in decision making keeping reasonable checks on consistency. It finds the priority rating of criteria, weighs them down to lower levels, checks for inconsistencies between relationships and correlation matrices, weighs interdependencies in engineering characteristics, evaluates the modified house of quality and establishes the overall contribution of engineering characteristics to satisfy customer needs.