A. N. Dessai

M. Caisucar

M. Caisucar

A. Salunke

Abstract

New Product Development (NPD) has become very important for automobile industry to survive in today's competitive market. The NPD process consist of several phases that an organisation employs in compound process of delivering new product to the market, involving research at all phases including product conception. The first phase of product development is idea generation phase. At idea generation phase new ideas crop up. All these ideas are not feasible, but few of them which are feasible involve qualitative as well as quantitative data. A study is done in an automobile manufacturing unit wherein decision to select best alternative among available alternative is carried out during idea generation phase of NPD. The data was collected from number of stakeholders having different technical/non-technical background and opinions, but having a equal say in decision making process. The opinion of each stakeholder is recorded in form of qualitative data and analysed during the study. This phase of decision making can be solved by Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methods. This paper shows the best alternative obtained through ARAS (Additive Ratio ASsessment). A 3-step approach has been used in this paper. Firstly, various important attributes and alternative from viewpoint of market are identified. Secondly criteria weightages and alternative rating are calculated from linguistic variables given by the decision makers. Finally, ARAS method is applied in the last step to get the best alternative. The alternative having highest score is taken as best alternative. All the decision makers were told to give their opinion in linguistic form and criteria weightages and alternative rating were calculated where equal weightages were given to each decision maker. Implications regarding idea generation phase, MADM, ARAS are discussed.

Keywords- NPD, linguistic, MADM method, ARAS method