The study of critical factors for alternative components management

Owing to the trend of mass customization, it´s impossible to fix the variation of product structure. In practice, adopting a suitable policy for Alternative Components is a popular method used to meet customers´ expectation. However, there are various objectives of adopting Alternative Components and sometimes they are in conflict with each other. Therefore a systematic analysis is needed to find out all the factors when setting up an Alternative Components policy. In this research, an Analytic Network Process (ANP) based assessment model was constructed to establish the relationship of management objectives and factors for Alternative Components. First, an expert questionnaire was used to filter out useful performance matrices that were used as the sub-criteria of the ANP model. Then, a real case was analyzed using the constructed ANP-based model to test the model´s effectiveness. The results indicate that quality, product reliability and product design are the three critical factors that affect the decision about which adopting Alternative Components policy to adopt. From the above, it´s obvious that quality is the most influential factor when making decisions concerning Alternative Components. These results are consisted with the practical experience gained in industry.