Developing strategies fostering product development using multicriteria analysis

Abstract

The success of the company lies in understanding the customer preferences and tastes and anticipating the changes required in existing or new products being offered. This study uses a combination of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) for evaluating the most satisfying design for customers. A case study for selection of bike has been presented here to illustrate the proposed approach. The contributions of this paper are (i) Structuring of the decision problem for assessment of impact of decisions after identification of customer attributes, preferences and alternatives (ii) Assessment of strategies to synthesise qualitative and quantitative factors in decision making keeping a check on consistency (iii) Using the additive synthesis of priorities for vector of multilinear forms and general feedback network to reduce multidimensional measurements (iv) Analysis of variances on decision techniques including analytical hierarchy process and analytical network process using the F-test on the results and Chi-square test.