For an organisation to sustain its competitive advantage, there is a strong need for timely adjustment to ever rapidly changing customer demands. To achieve this goal, known customer needs must be prioritised and transformed into organised down stream design requirements. This paper describes how a spreadsheet framework has been developed which incorporates a modified Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Systems Engineering Process (SEP) for product development and planning. The application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as a means of ranking top level user requirements. The methodology provides a pro‐active means and a strong link between quantified user requirements that are prioritised and product design/performance requirements, by assuring that down‐stream design requirements are incorporated into trade‐off decisions. An example is also presented to test and evaluate the spreadsheet approach in heavy engineering projects.
Innovation is the way that a business system turns its vision and foresight into reality. Unfortunately it can also be complex and limitless in its application and scope. This means that there is a great risk that you can charge off in the wrong direction, hence wasting considerable resources on the way and quite possibly causing significant and terminal failure. Strategy making and Soft Systems Engineering are critical in helping to aim the innovation effort in the right direction, such that resource deployment is optimised and the chances of success greatly improved. It must be noted that effective strategy making depends on the accurate forecasting and anticipation of change, which is difficult at the best of times. Be that as it may, it still remains the only way to tackle long range, significant and radical innovation. Tactical approaches are really only appropriate for minor and incremental innovation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.