A methodology for multi-characteristic system improvement with active expert involvement

When developing new products many different customer needs must be fulfilled. Often a few of the needs are prioritized (as emphasized in Quality Function Deployment) and most effort in the project is focused on these needs. However, even though there may be only four or five customer needs that are important, it is not easy to develop a product that complies with all of these. A well-known approach to this problem is to use Design of Experiments to find the settings of the system parameters. In a situation with several system characteristics, the analysis of the experiment is not as uncomplicated as in the case with just one system characteristic. This problem has been dealt with in the literature but not as much as one would expect. In this paper we present a methodology to deal with multi-characteristic system improvement, using active expert involvement. Our methodology, which is based on methods from four areas: Expert Groups, Design of Experiments, Conjoint Analysis and Optimization, is introduced using an example.