17 Use Cases for Analyzing Use Phase Data in Product Planning of Manufacturing Companies

Abstract

Product planning is transforming. For decades, product managers searched for potentials for improvement of their products using methods such as interviews and workshops with customers. Since the information gained with these methods was predominantly qualitative and often also incomplete, product managers also had to rely on their own experience as well as on assumptions about potentials for improvement. However, as a result of the transformation from mechatronic products to cyber-physical systems, a product’s use phase can now be investigated in detail utilizing extensive use phase data. For example, the strengths and weaknesses of the product, as well as the behavior of customers and users, can be observed. The analysis of these data enables product planning based on facts. Currently, however, product managers struggle to identify potentials for improvement resulting from use phase data analyses. In addition to a lack of methods, they especially lack useful examples and use cases for the analysis of use phase data in product planning, which provide them with orientation in the sense of references to plan their analyses.To identify such use cases, we conducted two workshops with 17 product planning and data science experts. This paper presents the results of these workshops: 17 use cases for analyzing use phase data in product planning. Each use case includes exemplary questions which could be answered through data analytics and suggestions on the data required. These suggestions are based on five categories of use phase data that are also derived from the results of the two workshops. Furthermore, each use case is connected to specific elements of value to demonstrate its usefulness and its intended utilization. With these results, we present the first comprehensive overview of use cases for analyzing use phase data in product planning.