Two-stage product design selection by using PROMETHEE and Taguchi method: A case study

The main goal of this paper was to introduce the methodology for product design selection. The proposed methodology combines two classical methods to find the most appropriate design for the new product, through a reduced number of alternatives (product variants) and experiments for the selection process. In the first stage, the multi-criteria decision-making method, PROMETHEE was used for selecting the most suitable design, according to the chosen preferences and criteria. In the second stage, the Taguchi method was used in order to define the most appropriate parameters for selected suitable design. The fundamental scientific contribution of this paper refers to a benefit introduced by combining these methods. This benefit is related to the reduction of product development time which has a significant effect on manufacturing process time due to the high market pressure. The proposed methodology was applied to find the appropriate table design for CNC milling machine located in the Lean Learning factory. However, this is just one case study to present the proposed methodology which can be applied for other optimization of other product designs. Before applying the proposed methodology for this case study, the methodology is validated on a simple example.