A Strategy for Managing Customer-oriented Product Design

Customer requirements play an important role in securing the competitive advantages of a company’s new product development endeavors. Based on the concept of quality function deployment (QFD), this article presents a novel procedure to effectively link customer requirements with design characteristics for product design. The proposed procedure comprises an analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which is adapted to evaluate the importance of customer requirements, and an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique, which is used to tackle the interdependency of customer requirements so as to clarify their structural relationships. The procedure is validated using a case study on the design of functional clothes. The details of the validation are presented and discussed.