Customer Requirements Management Research Articles

Smart experience-oriented customer requirement analysis for smart product service system: A novel hesitant fuzzy linguistic cloud DEMATEL method

Smart product service system (PSS) has become an essential strategy to transform towards digital servitization for manufacturing companies. By leveraging smart capabilities, smart PSS aims to create superior user experience in a smart context. To develop a successful smart PSS, customer requirement management from smart experience perspective is necessary. However, it is a challenging task to identify and evaluate diverse, implicit and interrelated smart experience-oriented customer requirement (SEO-CR) in smart PSS context. Hence, this paper proposes an effective methodology to elicit and analyze SEO-CRs. At first, a generic, two-dimensional SEO-CR system is presented as a basis to derive the tailored SEO-CRs for various smart PSS applications. Second, a novel HFLC-DEMATEL (hesitant fuzzy linguistic cloud-based Decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory) method is proposed to accurately evaluate the priority and complicated interaction of SEO-CRs, considering the hesitancy, fuzziness and randomness under uncertain decision environment. Some new operations (e.g., cloud total-relation matrix and weight determination method) and a cloud influence relation map are developed to fully take advantage of cloud model in DEMATEL implementation. Finally, a real case of smart vehicle service system (SVSS) is presented. The 18 SEO-CRs of the SVSS are derived based on the generalized SEO-CRs. By using HFLC-DEMATEL, some important SEO-CRs in context of SVSS are identified, such as autonomous and convenience. The finding of results can help designers make proper decisions in design and development of SVSS with a superior smart experience. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method are validated by conducting some comparative analyses.

The management of customer requirements in a product-service system context: a case study in the medical equipment sector

The paper addresses the evaluation of customer requirements (CRs) in the implementation of services in a product-service system (PSS) context. The extension of services has expanded considerably, yet their correct combination with products is still problematic to manufacturers. Services are characterised by ambiguities and vagueness, hindering their effective implementation. Conventional product design tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) are limited when comprehending the intangibility of services and hence, evaluating and prioritising customer requirements. To address this topic, QFD is adapted to a service context through the integration of the fuzzy logic and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a means of reducing inaccuracies. The approach is applied to a case study in the medical field and its results are compared to the traditional QFD to analyse its outcomes and the effectiveness of the augmentations in increasing the usefulness of QFD in a PSS context.

The management of customer requirements in a product-service system context: a case study in the medical equipment sector

The paper addresses the evaluation of customer requirements (CRs) in the implementation of services in a product-service system (PSS) context. The extension of services has expanded considerably, yet their correct combination with products is still problematic to manufacturers. Services are characterised by ambiguities and vagueness, hindering their effective implementation. Conventional product design tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) are limited when comprehending the intangibility of services and hence, evaluating and prioritising customer requirements. To address this topic, QFD is adapted to a service context through the integration of the fuzzy logic and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a means of reducing inaccuracies. The approach is applied to a case study in the medical field and its results are compared to the traditional QFD to analyse its outcomes and the effectiveness of the augmentations in increasing the usefulness of QFD in a PSS context.

Ability to Use Flexible Project Management in the Hotel Business

The article discusses the possibilities of implementing flexible project management methods to ensure the effectiveness of projects in the hospitality industry. The Project Leader should encourage each participant to abandon his or her approved behavior model in order to promptly resolve any issues that may arise during the implementation of the project and to respond to internal objections. As the hotel business is customer-centric, providing end-to-end services is not possible through standard management of individual customer requirements. Therefore, this study aims to determine the feasibility of using the methodology by identifying several criteria for project management (APM) in the hotel business.

Project Customer Requirements Management Using Fuzzy Numbers

Project Management (PM) takes into account a large number of parameters of different nature. Their diversity and mutual dependencies are one of the main hindrances to successful management of projects. Certain parameters such as time, cost, risk are measurable, nevertheless they should be estimated before the project realization. These estimations are to an extent always vulnerable to uncertainty, owing to a multitude of unstable factors. Therefore, despite the measurability of such quantities, the problem of uncertainty remains, affecting negatively the project management process. In case of parameters that are immeasurable, the situation is much more complicated. As examples, let us take elements (phenomena, states) of mental, psychological character like Project Manager’s and project team qualities, stakeholders satisfaction, or customer ability to formulate his requirements. The fuzzy approach is commonly recognized as an apparatus to pattern uncertainty in a large family of research and practical applications. Since several years one can observe this trend in PM research. There is a number of papers on project time, cost, and risk management, employing fuzzy numbers as a tool of uncertainty modelling of these project parameters management. On the contrary, one can seldom encounter conceptual or applied research for immeasurable PM parameters. The objective of this paper is to offer a contribution to partially fill this gap. It will be achieved in the form of Project Customer Requirements Management Model, using fuzzy numbers.

Comparison of series products from customer online concerns for competitive intelligence

Online reviews provide valuable information for product designers and the integration of online concerns into new product design has been investigated by different researchers. However, few of them exploit the value of online concerns on the comparison of series products. Analyzing online concerns of series products facilitates designers to obtain shared customer preferences regarding products in a series and recognize the strength and weakness of products in competitive series. Accordingly, a framework is designed to discover shared pros and cons of series products by exploring online customer concerns, in which representative opinionated sentences are sampled from reviews of series products. In particular, opinionated sentences of specific features are initially identified from product reviews. Then, opinionated sentences regarding the same series products are clustered, which helps to extract similar customer concerns. Finally, an optimization problem is formulated for the sampling of a few opinionated representative sentences. With a large number of real data from Amazon.com, categories of experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This study explores to integrate big consumer data for competitive intelligence in the market driven new product design, which helps the theoretical development on customer requirement management in the fierce market.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Management Information Systems for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: a User Satisfaction Approach

The article introduces a complex approach for the development and implementation of information systems for small and medium-sized enterprises based on small business specifics and customer requirements evaluation of the system being developed. The proposed approach is based on customer requirements modeling and management in systems development and deployment processes.We consider information system is an integral part of the technological process of a company's management, a part of business. Information system's effectiveness analysis with regard of their consumers by means of conceptual modeling will allow small and medium-sized enterprises make a grounded decision when choosing a program system before its implementation.

Enhancing Customer Delight in LED Televisions by Using the KANO Model

Customer requirement management has become one of the principal factors for product development to succeed in the market place. Product is the most important element in the marketing mix. It provides the functional requirements sought by customers. The television market in India is graduating from the cathode ray (CRT) television to LED (light emitting diode) television. The technology applied television creates new needs even as they serve others. The Kano model is a better tool for determination of customer requirements for new product development and innovation. The Kano model has been applied for multiple new product design and innovation for compliance with customer needs with respect to customer satisfaction. The objective of the present study was to measure product requirements from customers' perspectives for product development and thereby to achieve a competitive advantage in the LED television market. The study was based on primary data collected from 150 sample respondents (drawn by using the random sampling method) who were the users of LED television, irrespective of the brand of television. The positive customer satisfaction coefficient on the feature : clear motion rate brought more than proportional satisfaction. The quality improvement index brought out the key product features that could be incorporated in designing LED television to gain a competitive advantage in the LED television market.

Return merchandize authorization stakeholders and customer requirements management—high-technology products

Asian-based enterprises providing high-technology mass market products to developed countries are competing in a marketplace where customers are demanding the highest standards of service. To develop successful product service capabilities, including technological change, product differentiation, timing, contingency planning, marketing and financial considerations, these companies need to fully identify the market stakeholders and quantitatively prioritize their requirements. This paper describes a methodology to identify the different types of stakeholders in the high-technology product market and manage their requirements. The methodology provides a basis for sustainable competition that exploits global market opportunities and enables ultra-fast-to-market products to be supported at a level that meets customer demands. The case study application is in mass market electronic products; the potential application is wide.

Customer Requirement Management in Product Development

Customer requirement management has been wellrecognized as the principal factor for developing a successful product in the marketplace. This has been acknowledged in an exponentially increasing number of publications in the field of customer satisfaction and requirement management, as well as in many endeavors in industrial applications. This research topic shows a multidisciplinary characteristic involving such fields as business studies, marketing research, psychological studies, human factors, software requirement engineering, and of course product and engineering design. In recent times, the importance of these front-end issues has been catalyzed by enormous e-commerce applications. This special issue is dedicated to the recent advances in customer requirement management. While requirement engineering has been intensively studied in the field of software and information systems, the focus of this special issue is given to the design and development of consumer and capital products. Based on the thorough and strict peer reviews, a total of eight papers are selected for publication from 38 submissions. These papers represent a snapshot of the cutting-edge research progress and aim to disseminate information on recent developments in the field of customer requirement management. The article by Jiao, Chen, and Fung, ‘Customer Requirement Management in Product Development: A Review of Research Issues’, provides a comprehensive literature review. It substantially extends this editorial discussion on the status quo of approaches and techniques for customer requirement management in product development. The article discusses the general process of customer requirement management. The emphasis is on a holistic view and system-wide solutions that encompass requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In the article, avenues for future research are highlighted along with technical challenges. Henson, Barnes, Livesey, Childs, and Ewart, in their article, ‘Affective Consumer Requirements: A Case Study of Moisturizer Packaging’, apply affective engineering approaches to the elicitation of customers’ subjective requirements. A case study of moisturizer packaging is reported, demonstrating how to recombine stimuli that have been tested separately. The results of focus groups and semantic questionnaires are fine-tuned based on the principal component analysis in order to translate the subjective requirements into values for physical properties of the packaging. The elicited requirements regarding surface textures, shape, and color are validated through the questionnaire responses to prototype packaging. The article by Khalid and Helander, ‘Customer Emotional Needs in Product Design’, emphasizes on the emotional aspect of customer requirements. The characteristics of customer emotions are discussed in detail, along with issues concerning their measurement and evaluation. They present a framework of articulating customer emotions in relation to the designer’s environment. As part of the product development life cycle, the framework enables customer needs and measured emotions to be fed early in the design process, so as to achieve a pleasurable and satisfying product. With focus on the relationships between consumers’ Kansei feelings and products’ formal elements, Chen *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jiao@pmail.ntu.edu.sg

Customer Requirement Management in Product Development: A Review of Research Issues

The importance of customer requirement management in product development has been well-recognized in both academia and industry alike. This article provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research in this field. Customer requirement management entails various issues related to requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification, as well as the requirement management process. With respect to a holistic view of customer requirement management, key challenges and future research directions are identified.

CREAMS: a customer requirements elicitation and management system for product conceptualisation

In this paper, a Customer Requirements Elicitation and Management System (CREAMS) is proposed to effectively support product conceptualisation decisions by integrating various multidisciplinary requirements and concerns. A two-module CREAMS has been established for the purpose of eliciting and managing customer requirements for developing product concepts. During the process of customer requirements elicitation, the web-based survey is utilised to obtain customer information. The Intelligent Agent (IA), which consists of a pattern recognition engine and a query engine, is employed for further customer requirements evaluation and management. The system has been validated using a case study on the design of a wood golf club head.

Evaluation of multicultural factors from elicited customer requirements for new product development

Globalisation has been characterised as one of the recent trends in new product development (NPD), in which multicultural factors, in particular, dominate the initial step of product development. Moreover, the voice of customers has been widely accepted as an important source of input to subsequently obtain design metrics and specifications in the early stage of product concept design. For this purpose, customer requirements elicitation and management will determine the success level of an organisation's NPD and benchmarking. Hence, multicultural factors are the most difficult issues for organisations to address, even with the assistance of today's advanced computer systems. It has, accordingly, been one of the future directions in NPD. However, in practice, there are few successful or effective techniques available for the evaluation of multicultural factors in customer requirements. This paper aims at realising a prototype system that combines the strengths of the laddering technique and the radial basis function (RBF) neural network for customer requirements acquisition and multicultural factors evaluation. The performance of the prototype system was illustrated using a case study on mobile hand phone design. The results are discussed in detail.

A Radial Basis Function Neural Network Multicultural Factors Evaluation Engine For Product Concept Development

In recent years, new product development (NPD) has become more and more competitive and globalized. In order to succeed in the global marketplace, it is imperative to take multicultural factors into serious consideration during the stage of product concept development. Generally, the voice of customers has been treated as a starting point to downstream product definition and design metrics determination in developing new product concepts. As a result, the elicitation, representation and management of customer requirements will determine the success level of an organization's NPD efforts. Therefore, multicultural factors, also known as the ‘macro’ perspective in the business environment, are the most significant imperatives for organizations to handle, especially in the current trend of globalization. In practice, there are few holistic and promising systems for multicultural factor evaluation in customer requirements. This work aims at realizing a prototype system that combines the strengths of the laddering technique and the radial basis function neural network for customer requirements acquisition and multicultural factor evaluation. The performance of the prototype system is illustrated by using a case study on the design of a refrigerator. The results obtained from the case study are discussed.

Managing individual customer service constraints under stochastic demand

In recent years management of customer requirements has been the foremost concern of most manufacturers. In this paper, we consider a single-period problem in which the manufacturer faces stochastic demand and individual service level constraints from multiple customers. We present a formulation for the problem that utilizes the structure of the underlying allocation problem and provide an algorithm that generates the optimal procurement quantity under the optimal random allocation policy. For a special case when there are two identical customers and their demand is jointly uniform, we derive an analytical expression for the optimal procurement quantity.

An intelligent hybrid system for customer requirements analysis and product attribute targets determination

Aligning its quality initiatives in synchronization with the customer's perception of values is one of the key management strategies for improving the competitive edge of an organization. Therefore, it will be a distinct advantage if one can succeed in effectively capturing the genuine and major customer attributes (requirements), systematically analysing and duly transforming them into the appropriate product attributes (features). This paper puts forward a novel approach for analysing customer attributes and projecting them into the relevant design, engineering and product attributes in order to facilitate decision-making and to guide downstream manufacturing planning and control activities. The proposed hybrid system incorporates the principles of quality function deployment, analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy set theory to tackle the complex and often imprecise problem domain encountered in customer requirement management. It offers an analytical and intelligent tool for decoding, prioritizing and inferring the qualitative, sometimes vague and imprecise Voice of Customer. As a result, the appropriate product attributes can be mapped out and their relevant design targets can be determined quantitatively and consistently. The software supporting the hybrid system is constructed within a generic framework which can be easily customized and configured into specific enterprise models capable of offering more timely responses to the dynamic market demand.