Defining Characteristics for Product Development Using Quality Function Deployment: A Case Study on Indian Bikes

The success of the company lies in understanding the customer preferences and tastes and anticipating the changes required in existing or new products being offered. This study uses a heuristic approach to formulate the problem of product development using a combination of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with quality function deployment (QFD) to evaluate the most satisfying design for customer. A case study for selection of a bike has been presented here to illustrate the proposed approach.

The contributions of the article are (a) structuring of the decision problem for assessment of impact of decisions after identification of customer attributes and preferences; (b) assessing strategies to synthesize qualitative and quantitative factors in decision-making, keeping checks on consistency; (c) using the additive synthesis of priorities to accommodate a variety of interactions and transform multidimensional measurements to unidimensional ratio scale; and (d) assessing the impact of the engineering characteristics weights on the priority of the criteria and overall project (v) Validation of the model using case study.