Managing product development resources through the use of product quality attribute mapping

AbstractA technique using product quality attribute mapping to assist product resourcing decisions is described. Primary data from respondents via quantitative questionnaire surveys of four different industrial manufacturing companies were collected and analysed. Care was taken with the data source and type of scales employed to ensure meaningful comparisons could be made. The first objective of the data analysis was to determine the importance of each of the companies' customers. This was followed by determining the importance of the product attributes to each customer. An overall perception of product attribute importance was obtained by combining the customer importance with the importance of product attributes. The respondents' perceptions of the competitive situation was then combined with the overall perception of product attribute importance to give a quality index for each product attribute. The derived picture product attributes relative to one another are shown by bubble maps indicating the posi...