| Abstrakt: |
Improving the quality of processed food products produced by small and household industries, commonly referred to as MSMEs, is expected to increase regional economic growth and local employment. This can be realized by creating products that can satisfy the community's needs, so it is necessary to improve the quality of MSME products in general, mainly processed food products. These improvements are needed so that local MSME products can face competition with similar products produced by large factories, including imported processed food products that can dominate the local market. This effort is not intended to create higher quality processed food products than the quality of products produced by large factories or imported products but to meet the community's needs. For this reason, quality improvement analysis through research is needed to obtain quality improvement solutions that satisfy customer needs. The targeted products for research are crackers and fried products made from wheat flour produced by MSMEs in the Medan and Deli Serdang areas of North Sumatra Province. This research involves the main stakeholders, namely the owners of MSMEs who produce these processed food products and the people who consume these types of processed foods. This research begins with determining the type of product understudy, then analyzing the results of questionnaires and interviews to obtain customer voices which will be transformed by using the house of quality in applying the Quality Function Deployment method. The QFD method is applied with the principle of prioritizing the voice of the customer, which is then translated into process and product characteristics. The results of this study are expected to be useful as suggestions for improving the quality of the MSME products studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
