An intelligent hybrid system for customer requirements analysis and product attribute targets determination

Aligning its quality initiatives in synchronization with the customer's perception of values is one of the key management strategies for improving the competitive edge of an organization. Therefore, it will be a distinct advantage if one can succeed in effectively capturing the genuine and major customer attributes (requirements), systematically analysing and duly transforming them into the appropriate product attributes (features). This paper puts forward a novel approach for analysing customer attributes and projecting them into the relevant design, engineering and product attributes in order to facilitate decision-making and to guide downstream manufacturing planning and control activities. The proposed hybrid system incorporates the principles of quality function deployment, analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy set theory to tackle the complex and often imprecise problem domain encountered in customer requirement management. It offers an analytical and intelligent tool for decoding, prioritizing and inferring the qualitative, sometimes vague and imprecise Voice of Customer. As a result, the appropriate product attributes can be mapped out and their relevant design targets can be determined quantitatively and consistently. The software supporting the hybrid system is constructed within a generic framework which can be easily customized and configured into specific enterprise models capable of offering more timely responses to the dynamic market demand.