1. iv
ABSTRACT
This research project focuses specifically on the decision making aspect in the
technical sales of automation engineering services. This project has two objectives; first
is to identify customer needs based on priorities and preferences for automation
engineering services requirements and secondly to develop a quality function deployment
model as decision assessment tool to identify, prioritize and translate customer needs into
a workable sales and project proposal. To achieve the objectives, document analysis was
conducted on five sets of documents that represented customer’s communication of their
requirements. Subsequently records of verbal communications with the customers were
also analyzed. The purposed of this analysis was to identify keyword that indicated
customer’s priority requirements. The identified priorities were than analyzed in terms of
the organization’s technical capability to achieve them and similarly competitor’s
capabilities as well. The research project achieves its objectives by successfully
identifying the top six priorities to be considered in decision making during the sales
process of automation engineering services and its necessary technical specification. This
information is then used to develop the conceptual Quality Function Deployment model
that can be used by an organization to improve their sales process.