Understanding the voice of the customers (VOCs) and properly incorporating their preferences and perceptions into the conceptual design process is the core step of customer-driven product development. To improve customer satisfaction and market profitability, the design team should have a customer-driven quality management and product development system. Quality function deployment (QFD) is an important customer-driven quality management tool that helps identify customer requirements and translate them into proper technical measures. This paper focuses on the application of the AHP and an entropy-based QFD approach on a manufacturing company to improve the quality of its product (blender) and determine the priorities for further improvement. The paper shows how customer requirements can be identified and applied to prioritize the design requirements for improving the quality of a blender. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is integrated to determine the final importance of the weights of the customer needs, and entropy is used to determine the set of priority ratings. This integrated framework can help achieve an effective evaluation of the final design solution for product development by overcoming the pitfalls of the traditional QFD approach. An application in a Bangladeshi company that produces blenders is presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.

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Challenges of operational safety and reliability as well as optimal operation of boiler feed water pump define the requirement of a competent and efficient controlling as well as monitoring tool. The monitoring module of this tool should effectively record the life time consumption of both casings and rotors and also monitor the small gaps between casings and rotors. The controlling module of this tool should ensure the safety and reliability during the operation of the boiler feed water pump based on the feed back from the monitoring module and also should take appropriate actions in order to ensure that the pump operates within the allowable design limits. This tool could enable operators to start up the boiler feed water pump without any unnecessary waiting period and change load rapidly without causing any damage or any life consumption rate getting increased. In this research paper, the methodology of such a tool is explained, having monitoring as well as controlling modules. Similar monitoring and controlling tools, as presented in the paper, can be applied to all turbomachines e.g. gas turbines, steam turbines, compressors etc.

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