Improving Quality Of Local Leather Products On The Perception Of Domestic Consumers By Using QFD: The Case Of Leather Producing SMES
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2020-10
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Ethiopia has a large livestock, one of the leading in Africa and 6th in the world, giving the country a natural comparative advantage in the leather sector.
However, vertical disintegration shed light to various factors that prevent Ethiopia from being a competitive actor in both international and local leather product market. From those factors design quality is one of the main factors affecting local consumer preference of leather products. In general, domestic leather footwear, goods and garments are incapable to convince customers in terms of design, attractiveness, quality, and variety. For this reason, customers prefer to use import goods which are superior in meeting customer requirements. On the other hand, local leather producing SMEs are suffering to survive in the market because of lacking the import goods persona leading customers to buy imported products. In order to overcome this situation, the role of customer requirement assessment in terms of design quality is basic to beat the challenge of imported goods market dominance.
The objective of this study was to identify technical requirements of design quality that should be considered while designing local leather products which meet the assessed consumer requirements. In this study, both primary and secondary data were collected and used. Primary data was collected from local customers, producers (SMEs), LIDI employees, designers & engineers on how these three types of information impacted consumers preferences of design quality perception is questioned through a qualitative study. Product quality designer explained in to three types of information communicated in the course of aesthetic design quality, symbolic design quality and functional design quality through QFD. Among different methods and techniques employed to survey customer requirements, Quality Function Deployment is a well-known methodology for customer requirement assessment along with interpretation in to technical language.
The study result identified customers higher priority requirements from the three design quality dimensions, the study found out, aesthetic design is the customers priority (such as color, variety, texture, features & attractiveness) and symbolic design as the second priority. The study also found out ICT platform as an assessment tool for customer requirement. If these identified requirements are fulfilled, it would lead to higher customer satisfaction. This study provides valuable information for both enterprises and academia and identifies areas that must be addressed by the producer to meet customer demand. The study also indicates the intervention areas that demand institutional support.
Description
Keywords
design quality, customer requirement, Leather products, customer satisfaction, QFD