Introducing Strategic Processes of a New Product Development into the Upstream QFD and its Software Tool

摘要

In the phase of quality planning in QFD, each weight of required quality items is usually computed by applying arithmetic operations to ordinal scale data. The computation is regarded to be approximate; but it is not logical, to be exact. That is why AHP was put into practice in late years. Most of AHP applications in QFD make pairwise comparison mainly from users or customers viewpoint, where a strategy of company would not be explicitly considered. The authors propose a method of strategy planning for a new product development, taking into consideration the relation between market segments and new products. In this paper, ANP (Analytic Network Process) proposed by T. L. Saaty is effectively applied. And then, the "Conjoint Analysis" is suggested to be successively used for clarifying the product concept. A software supporting tool is also reported.