Customer requirements play an important role in securing the competitive advantages
of a company’s new product development endeavors. Based on the concept of
quality function deployment (QFD), this article presents a novel procedure to
effectively link customer requirements with design characteristics for product
design. The proposed procedure comprises an analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which
is adapted to evaluate the importance of customer requirements, and an interpretive
structural modeling (ISM) technique, which is used to tackle the interdependency of
customer requirements so as to clarify their structural relationships. The procedure
is validated using a case study on the design of functional clothes. The details of
the validation are presented and discussed.
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