A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR NEW PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS SELECTION: USING FUZZY QFD AND ANN CASE STUDY: DIGITAL SCALE PRODUCER

Many enterprises have been devoting a significant portion of their budget to product development in order to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and to make them better fit the needs and wants of customers. An important source of competitive advantage, survival and renewal for firms is the successful new product development (NPD). Quality function deployment (QFD) aims to facilitate the NPD process from product conceptualization to production requirements. This paper proposes a decision system to support product development and used from first matrix of QFD. A case study of a scale producer firm to select the Specification of new product based on data collected from designed questionnaires is given which includes identification & determination of customers’ needs, while looking for technical and engineering characteristics related to their needs. The results are then used to construct houses of quality for QFD, which is incorporated by fuzzy AHP. A feed forward back propagation ANN is designed and trained based on the houses of quality. The result of neural net simulation is compared with the results from fuzzy QFD model. It is concluded that the proposed decision support system by combining the fuzzy QFD and ANN models can be used as a powerful tool to select the most suitable specification for new products to satisfy customer's needs.

New product development (NPD) ; Quality function deployment (QFD) ; Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) ; Decision Support Systems (DSS) ; Artificial Neural Network (ANN)