Choosing The Best Car Brand Using SMART Analysis - Essay.

A.Identify a problem facing your organisation, you personally or an organisation that you are associated with that is amenable to the Simple Multi-attribute Rating Technique (SMART) and apply a SMART analysis to it. Ensure that you give a brief outline of the problem and explain why SMART is an appropriate technique to be applied.

You should discuss the limitations and strengths of the use of decision analysis in relation to your chosen decision problem.

B.Write an essay that analyses the effectiveness of the various Design Methods discussed during the week as a means of decision making within the Design Process. You should refer to journal papers and academic text books to support your analysis and discussion. For example, if you wished to say that a particular decision tool is either effective or ineffective (for whatever reason) you would need to defend your argument with supportive material. You should aim to balance your views, giving examples of good practice as well as bad practice, where appropriate.

C.Taking either an organisation with which you are familiar or from a case study evaluate the following statement in the context of that organisation:

“Quality manuals are a waste of time, they take too long to prepare and don’t make any difference to the quality of the product.”

Ensure that you relate your discussion to the definitions and approaches to quality that were covered in the unit material and comment upon the recommended planning process for design and development projects.
 

The SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique) has been used as the decision support system in context to this study to choose the best brand of car. The list of the vehicles that have been chosen for this analysis are presented below which illustrates upon four different types of car brands such as Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan and Vauxhall.

1. Ford Fiesta – Ranked first in the list of bestselling cars of UK with 56,415 registrations.
2. Volkswagen Golf – Ranked second in the list of bestselling cars of UK with 39,930 registrations.
3. Nissan Qashqai – Ranked fourth in the list of bestselling cars of UK with 30,0667 registrations.
4. Vauxhall Corsa – Ranked fifth in the list of bestselling cars of UK with 28,003 registrations (Best-selling cars in the UK 2018).

For this analysis, information has been gathered from different sources such as journals, articles as well as websites. As a decision maker, I would prefer to choose the most cost efficient with better acceleration or top speed car.

1. Identification of the Decision Maker

I (Chiemeka Anyadike) is the decision maker for the chosen topic to select the best brand of car.

2. Identification of the alternative courses of action

The alternative courses of action for this SMART analysis is to choose the best brand of car based on some factors such as Space and Comfort of the chosen vehicles. However, the analysis here has been carried out by taking Cost and Speed as the main factors for choosing best brand of car.

3. Identification of the attributes relevant to the decision problem

The attributes that are relevant to the problem of decision making while selecting the best brand of car have been categorized in Figure 1 as presented below:

Figure 1: Value tree for decision making with attributes

The attributes have been categorized into high level and low level attributes as below:

High Level Attribute

• Cost
• Speed

Low Level Attribute

• Acceleration
• Top Speed

4. Assigning values to measure performances of alternatives on attributes

Effect of cost

Cost is the most important factor while purchasing of vehicles as it involves Maintenance cost along with Running cost and Capital cost. Every person is likely to buy a budget friendly car. However, it depends on the purpose of individual use, but cost efficient vehicle is always preferred by each of the team members. The cost efficient vehicles help to reduce the additional costs required for running or maintaining the vehicle. The price of the car is not the only factor that has to be considered while purchasing but it also have to be kept in mind that it does not create cost-overhead in the long run. Hence, arrangement of the chosen vehicles has been done in terms of lower to higher cost so that proper decision can be taken to select the best brand of car.

The score has been given to the vehicles according to their costs as the highest cost vehicle has been scored 0 and the lowest cost vehicle has been scored 100. The below table presents the preference of decision in a scale of 0 to 100 in which 0 is High cost and 100 is Low cost.

Determination of Relevant Attributes

Table 1: Effect of cost

Effect of acceleration

For this analysis, Acceleration has been also considered as an essential factor for evaluation which means at what time the car is able to achieve the next speed level. The acceleration has an important role to play in terms of cost as the running cost may increase if a vehicle has low acceleration rate.  

The score has been given to the vehicles according to their acceleration rates as the lowest acceleration vehicle has been scored 0 and the highest cost vehicle has been scored 100. The below table presents the preference of decision in a scale of 0 to 100 in which 0 is Low Acceleration rate and 100 is High Acceleration rate.

Table 2: Effect of acceleration

Effect of top speed

Top Speed is another variable which is considered as an objective attribute for the selection of the best brand car. This attribute is the measure of highest speed that can be achieved by a vehicle. The top speed is also sometimes a major factor, only if the road infrastructure is well developed and one has to reach at some particular place within a dedicated timeline. The data of top speed of the vehicles has been collected from online sources so that comparison of their speeds can be carried out easily (Polo and Prior 2014).

The score has been given to the vehicles according to their Top speed as the lowest top speed vehicle has been scored 0 and the highest top speed vehicle has been scored 100. The below table presents the preference of decision in a scale of 0 to 100 in which 0 is Low top speed and 100 is High top speed.

Table 3: Effect of top speed

Figure 2: Value Function for Vehicle Top Speed

The below Table 4 illustrates on the attributes and weighting values for the different top selling brands of Car in UK.

Table 4: Summary of attributes and weighting values

The lowest level attribute that have to be considered is the Cost of vehicles and it is followed by the Top Speed and Acceleration of the vehicles.

Swing Weights

Assuming Cost of vehicles

Table 5: Assuming cost of vehicles

The sum of the best values for the vehicles in terms of cost is calculated to be 200 and normalized are presented as below:

Table 6: Original and Normalized weights of each attribute

The higher level weight that is “Speed” is the sum of lower level weights as below:

Top Speed + Acceleration = (40+10) = 50

The performance of the chosen vehicles to determine the best brand of car is evaluated as below:

For Ford Fiesta

Table 7: Aggregate benefit for Ford Fiesta

For Volkswagen Golf

Table 8: Aggregate benefit for Volkswagen Golf

For Nissan Qashqai

Table 9: Aggregate benefit for Volkswagen Golf

For Vauxhall Corsa

Table 10: Aggregate benefit for Volkswagen Golf

The value and weights for the chosen vehicles have been summarized as below:

Table 11: Value and Weights of each vehicle

Figure 3: Graph of Aggregated Benefits against Cost for vehicles

Table 12: Value and Weights of each vehicle

From the determination of aggregated benefits in terms of the identified variables, it can be said that Vauxhall Corsa is the most dominated car/vehicle than the other vehicles in terms of cost and speed. The cost and the speed have been identified as the two major factors that are to be considered while selecting best brand of car. The benefits offered by Vauxhall Corsa is higher than the other chosen brand of vehicles.

It can be calculated that a benefit point of 31.6 is required by Ford Fiesta to move to Vauxhall Corsa.

A benefit point of 7.6 is required by Volkswagen Golf to move to Vauxhall Corsa but it lacks in terms of cost as the cost of Volkswagen Golf is much higher than Vauxhall Corsa.

Further, a benefit point of 29.1 is required by Nissan Qashqai to move to Vauxhall Corsa but it is not possible to achieve as Nissan Qashqai has a score of 0 for cost as it is the costliest car in the list of chosen vehicles.

Hence, it can be said that Vauxhall Corsa is the suitable car in terms of cost efficiency as well as speed.

Now, from section 5 it can be seen that the weight of Speed that is sum of lower level weight Top Speed and Acceleration is 50 and the Cost weight is (100 – 50) which is 50.

Figure 4: Sensitivity Analysis for Best Brand car

Table 13: Value and Weights of each vehicle

The values in the below table has been calculated with the help of Microsoft Excel to design the Figure 4.

Table 14: Sensitivity Analysis of each vehicle

References

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