Incorporating Customer Needs into Products : A Case Study in an FMCG Company

Sammanfattning: Understanding customers’ perception about the quality of product or service plays an important role in the success of any organization. The quality of a product should be satisfactory to customers in terms of usability, appearance, material, life span of the product, comfort and so on. This thesis is about understanding quality from the customer perspective. With the initiative from the case company, the authors tried to understand what the customers expects from the company and create a knowledge base for the company to improve their products’ quality and to provide a perception to implement a continuous quality improvement strategy. Customers are always satisfied with a good quality product. The authors have used different methods such as questionnaires, surveys and one-one discussions to extract the customer’s needs. The affinity diagram was used to categorize these needs and the pairwise method was used to ascertain the most important needs from customer perspective. The House of Quality is used to understand and define the attributes that the company needs to improve. Based on the outcomes of the QFD, the authors have suggested some future improvement strategies. Key Words: House of quality; Kano’s model; QFD; Quality improvement;