فرایند شبکه تحلیلی برای انتخاب نرم افزار در توسعه محصول : یک مطالعه موردی

Application of software for manufacturing processes is one of the resolutions many enterprises have resorted to in the 21st century. This has been a result of increased complexity of products, globalization, rapid changes in technology and so on. The idea was that application of software especially for product development would increase the competitive advantage of industry nevertheless the irony has been that most of the investment in software has not achieved the expected results. We carry out a case study to introduce a methodology, the analytical network process as a multiattribute strategic decision making approach to help in the selection of appropriate software to suit the product development process of a particular product.

According to a report by the MIT commission on industrial productivity, Dertouzos et al. (1989) asserted that the two major weaknesses hampering product development in America were seen as, technical weaknesses in development and production, and failures in co-operation (lack of teamwork). Globally, the later has been dealt with to a satisfactorily adequate level but the former has remained a problem for many enterprises despite the rapid increase of technology. Clark and Fujimoto (1991) reported that this could be associated with a number of factors like difficulty in designing for simplicity and reliability, disregarding competition, disregarding voice of customer, excessive development time, failure to incorporate quality in design phase, inadequate concentration on the product, slow decision making process and application of inappropriate technologies, a present dilemma. Technology failures could be accredited to the existence of rival technologies, design problems and failure to provide adequate quality. Furthermore, efforts to deal with market obstacles and management for instance have gone a long way in materialization, however, despite improved manufacturing concepts like lean production, agile manufacturing, concurrent engineering and so on, the technology problem has become gross as a result of increased software technology. We have witnessed the mushrooming of software not because of differentiation in functionality but as a result of the variation in vendors, i.e. we have many software programs performing the same functions but branded different names giving the impression they are all different yet actually they are not. In a part solution to deal with this problem, we carry out a case study by introducing and illustrating how the strategic multiattribute decision approach the analytical network process (ANP) could be used to select appropriate software for the product development process of a specified product. We attempt to eliminate the illusion that general knowledge in purchasing software is sufficient but that rather a multicriterion, multiattribute strategic decision making approach would yield better performance in the selection criteria. In our case study, we considered the production of a pen.

This methodology represents a managerial strategic approach to select PDP software for an enterprise intending to realize a product and bring it to the market. It is the first of its kind, its contribution is that decisions on software implementation in an enterprise can be made based on multiattribute or multicriteria factors that directly or indirectly affect the decision (intra- and inter-functional factors, respectively). The methodology basically addresses technical issues related to the product development process, though, in reality other factors need to be carefully incorporated like the cost of the software, the period for which it is required, the consideration of product and technology platforms, and so on. We thus conclude that this methodology is systematic, reliable, easy to apply and accessible as we have free web based AHP analysis software. It also offers a valuable means of acquiring and capturing knowledge in an enterprise as different people from various departments get together to brainstorm on issues concerning the pairwise comparisons, hence share and exchange valuable knowledge originally stored in intellectual assets. A common setback is when consensus cannot be reached on a matter, and also the decision analysts sometimes do not share the same vision of the project as the decision makers for whom they perform the ANP analysis, thus, some emphasis on major issues is skipped. Finally, the application of the ANP methodology offers a decision support mechanism and the final decision then has to be made by management (the decision makers) after a thorough consideration of other factors like budget constraints.