Value Analysis and Quality Function Deployment of Some Competing Food Products

Over the years, customer satisfaction derived from a product contributes to the survival and competitiveness of most businesses (Ling and Mansori, 2018).Nevertheless, product developers are often faced with the challenge of optimizing the benefit of a product with minimum cost, striking a balance between customer satisfaction, function improvement and cost reduction (Patel et al., 2015).This can be a major problem when competing products exists.Sometimes, focus is placed on improving the product while neglecting the increasing cost due to either, process, materials or ingredients selection.This may lead to consumer resistance and reduced profitability.Therefore, companies need to consider balancing profitability and pricing policies.While it is important for management not to trade quality for cost, the goal is usually to maximize profit while satisfying the market.Consumers perceive the quality of a product from different dimensions.These include aesthetic, functionality, price, durability, etc.The preference of a product over another could be as a result of family size, availability of product, income etc.(Ifediora and Ekoja, 2017).Irrespective of the quality desired it is important that it is embedded atthe product design stage (Rajeshand Sandeeep, 2018).Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has proven to be an important tool that aids in the incorporation of quality required by customers into the technical requirements of products.Also, understanding and improving the functionality of components that enable the improvement of the overall function of a product at reduced cost is important for the mutual benefit of the product developer as well as the consumers.The Pareto rule states that about 20% of the components in any complex product accounts for about 80% of the cost throughout the rest of its life-cycle (Hasanet al., 2018).In other words, if the components, constituents or materials for a particular product are critically analyzed to know the major components that will bring maximum satisfaction to a customer, unnecessary costscan be taken off, thus increasing the benefits to both customers and manufacturers on the long run.There is always a need to critically study a product to determine ways to improve the benefit to cost ratio.With