The prioritisation of attributes in customer requirement management

Acquiring and fully understanding the true requirements of customers is no easy task. However, if one can succeed in capturing these first hand messages and be able to reflect them during the design of a product with the appropriate focus and emphasis, the end result would be a quality product that could meet the real needs of the customers. 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 voice of customer tend to ambiguous and usually non-technical. Therefore, it could be difficult at times for designers to effectively interpret the customer demands and convert them into product specifications. Many enterprises have attempted to tackle this conversion process by applying the technique of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) which could be described graphically using a House of Quality (HoQ). With this approach, customer requirements are first transformed into product attributes, and subsequently into engineering characteristics for appropriate actions by the product designers and engineers. 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 illustrating the customer requirements analysis and product attributes mapping on a series of hi-fi equipment is also outlined.