The prioritisation of attributes in customer requirement management

Abstract

This paper expounds on a hybrid approach for capturing the customer requirements, translating them into design and product features, and finally prioritising them through quantitative analyses. The customer's voice is often ambiguous and nontechnical. Many enterprises have attempted to convert requirements into product specifications by the technique of quality function deployment (QFD) which could be described graphically using a house of quality (HoQ). With this approach, customer requirements are transformed into product attributes, and subsequently into engineering characteristics for appropriate actions. Hence, the resulting product would be more readily accepted by customers as they could see how the product features are related to their needs. Although the conventional HoQ could map the customers' wants and needs against the relevant product attributes, the relationships among the various entries are normally represented qualitatively. The modified approach described in this paper employed the principles of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) which could help transform the relationships into quantitative terms as well as identify the priority of each attribute to facilitate decision-making in resource allocation. A case study on a Hi-Fi equipment series is given.