Improve Product Design Research Articles

Marketing Innovation Strategy and Entrepreneurial Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in Nakuru East Town Sub-County

The economic development of a country is determined by various key roles played by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). They contribute approximately 40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and create 80 percent of jobs. However, SMEs have been facing performance challenges which threaten their sustainability based on entrepreneurial abilities. Therefore, it is in the interest of the Kenyan government, organizational philosophers, managers and equally entrepreneurs who have long shown more interest in innovation in SMEs, predominantly due to the vital role innovation plays in safeguarding sustained competitive gain. In consequence of the increase in competition levels, it is therefore necessary to identify appropriate innovation strategies that would make their product and services competitive in the market in which they operate in. Thus, this study’s objective was to define and determine the effect of marketing innovation strategy and entrepreneurial performance of SMEs in Nakuru East Town Sub-County, Kenya. This study’s specific objective was the effect of Marketing Innovation Strategy on entrepreneurial performance of selected SMEs in Nakuru East Town Sub-County, Kenya. It is in this context that Nakuru East Town Sub-County was targeted because of the high rate of SMEs decline in the area and the variability in the entrepreneurial nature of 1,259 SMEs that have single business permits operating in the area including: wholesalers and retailers, fishmongers, salons and barbershops, cybercafés, hotels and cafes, construction, and hardware stores. The study engaged a descriptive and explanatory research design that targeted 126 respondents who are 10 percent of the selected registered 1,259 SMEs in Nakuru East Town Sub-County. A questionnaire which had open and close ended questions was adopted in this study. The questionnaire was administered using drop-and-pick later methods for some, and for others the researcher herself used an interview schedule. The respondents of the study were the owner or the in-charge/manager of the SME. The questionnaire was piloted to determine validity and to establish whether the questions will measure the expected theorized variables. According to the findings, all of the items' Cronbach's Alpha values were greater than 0.7. this indicated that that the questionnaires used to collect the data were reliable. The data collected was quantitative and was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. According to the findings, there is a strong positive and significant relationship between marketing innovation strategy and entrepreneurial performance of SMEs in Nakuru East Town Sub-County. Based on these conclusions, the study suggests and recommends that SMEs business owners should consider improving product design, introduce new distribution channels, find new markets for their products and change their advertising methods. These will lead to growth in the market share, customer satisfaction, profitability and efficiency. 

Development of Multimedia-Based Worksheets as a Teaching Material on Sub-Material of Invertebrates

The purpose of this study is to develop multimedia- based student worksheets in invertebrates sub materials and to describe both the response and scoring result of tenth grade students in Pontianak who learn to use the instructional materials. This research method is Research and Development. The development steps carried out are: 1) potential and problems, 2) information gathering, 3) product design, 4) design validation, 5) product design improvement and 6) product testing. In the product trial phase, a sample of 208 students was used. The validation from both material and media experts on multimedia- based student worksheets in invertebrate sub- materials was confirmed as valid. The student responses at schools with KTSP and curriculum 2013 on the use of multimedia- based student worksheets in Invertebrates sub material were in the fair positive and positive category. The average values obtained by students in schools that applied the KTSP and 2013 curriculum were 40.08 and 54.16 respectively. It was concluded that multimedia-based worksheets were appropriate to be used as teaching material in invertebrates sub material.

High temperature creep strength design and optimization of solid oxide fuel cell

In order to improve product design efficiency and guarantee the high temperature structural integrity during the long-term creep of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), the creep strength design method is studied by using the finite element method (FEM) and the response surface method (RSM) with considering the interaction between the geometric parameters. A multi-regression model representing the correlation between the sealant failure probability and the geometric parameters is established for rapid estimation of creep strength and optimization design of geometric dimensions. The sealant failure probability is decreased from 0.994 to 0.015 by the optimization of SOFC geometrical size. And the error between results predicted by the FEM and results predicted by the multi-regression model is less than 10%. Therefore, the multi-regression model is proven to be an excellent tool for creep failure prediction and structural design optimization, reducing research costs and time, and improving design efficiency.

A Systematic Procedure for Utilization of Product Usage Information in Product Development

Product design is crucial for product success. Many approaches can improve product design quality, such as concurrent engineering and design for X. This study focuses on applying product usage information (PUI) during product development. As emerging technologies become widespread, an enormous amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product’s life, such as customer reviews, condition monitoring, and maintenance data. In recent years, the literature describes the application of data analytics technologies such as machine learning to promote the integration of PUI during product development. However, as of today, PUI is not efficiently exploited in product development. One of the critical issues to achieve this is identifying and integrating task-relevant PUI fit for purposes of different product development tasks. Nevertheless, preparing task-relevant PUI that fits different product development tasks is often ignored. This study addresses this research gap in preparing task-relevant PUI and rectifies the related shortcomings and challenges. By considering the context in which PUI is utilized, this paper presents a systematic procedure to help identify and specify developers’ information needs and propose relevant PUI fitting the actual information needs of their current product development task. We capitalize on an application scenario to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.

Convolutional Neural Network Based Network Distance English Teaching Effect Evaluation Method

Aiming at the low accuracy of English teaching quality evaluation, a user perception evaluation modeling method based on convolutional neural network was proposed. Make full use of product usage data to establish quantitative mapping between teaching quality assessment and teaching quality to support product design improvement. On this basis, a convolutional neural network structure suitable for user perception evaluation model is established. Then, the optimal hyperparameters of the model were determined by k-fold cross validation analysis, and the overfitting problem of the model was improved. Finally, an example of user perception modeling for smart phones is taken to verify the effectiveness of the method. It is used for user perception assessment and prediction, which can help English teaching methods timely and accurately assess performance and provide decision support for English teaching improvement. SKYPE is currently the world's most popular Internet remote video, audio, text, and real-time interactive platform; the real-time audio and video communication is very clear; the remote education will expand to the family, especially to promote the remote universality and universal English education that can play a big role. In this paper, the basic function and performance of the platform are presented, and distance education in English presents a practical approach to the application aspects.

A Generic Graph-Based Method for Flexible Aspect-Opinion Analysis of Complex Product Customer Feedback

Product design experts depend on online customer reviews as a source of insight to improve product design. Previous works used aspect-based sentiment analysis to extract insight from product reviews. However, their approaches for requirements elicitation are less flexible than traditional tools such as interviews and surveys. They require costly data labeling or pre-labeled datasets, lack domain knowledge integration, and focus more on sentiment classification than flexible aspect-opinion analysis. Related works lack effective mechanisms for probing the customer feedback of complex configurable products. This study proposes a generic graph-based opinion mining and analysis method for product design improvement. First, a customer feedback data preprocessing and annotation pipeline that can incorporate designer-specified domain knowledge is proposed. Second, an intuitive opinion-aware labeled property graph data model is designed to ingest preprocessed feedback data and perform ad hoc opinion analysis. Applying the generic model to a real-world dataset demonstrates superior functionality and flexibility compared to related works. A wider range of analyses is supported in a single model without repeating data preprocessing and modeling. Specifically, the proposed method supports regular and comparative aspect-opinion analysis, aspect satisfaction/influence ranking, opinion trend extraction, and targeted aspect-opinion summarization.

An Assembly-Oriented Design Framework for Additive Manufacturing

The shape complexity capability of additive manufacturing (AM) is currently the main thrust of the design for AM (DFAM) research. In order to aid designers embracing that complexity-for-free characteristics of AM, many design approaches have been put forth. However, AM does not only benefit parts’ designs: its capability can be harnessed at assembly level to design performant and innovative products. Most of the few contributions on the topic are concerned with part consolidation of existing assemblies, but other advantages such as assembly-free mechanisms, multi-material components, or even component embedding can also improve product design complexity. This paper aims to put forth a thorough DFAM framework for new product development (made of multiple parts) and which consider all the assembly-related characteristics of AM. It considers what can be called AM-based architecture minimization, which includes, among others, part consolidation and assembly-free mechanisms as well. Within context of an ‘AM-factory’, in which the most appropriate machine(s) is/are selected for easing a whole assembly manufacturing before the detailed geometric definition is committed. For the sake of completeness, a methodology based on functional flows has also been investigated for the parts’ design. A gripper as case study has been introduced to illustrate the framework.

How to identify product defects and segment consumer groups on an online auto forum

AbstractChina's automotive industry has entered a stage of great growth. Owing to the widespread and rapid information dissemination of online automotive forums, they have become an important source for manufacturers to collect product defect information and understand consumer preferences. The purpose of this study is to investigate car defect information and consumer preferences from online automotive forums and segment consumers based on consumer preferences, which holds great promise as a means for companies to improve product design and consumer relationship management. Based on text data of China's top‐ranked Pacific Auto Network, we applied the LDA model, sentiment analysis, text classification, and cluster analysis methods to determine the influencing factors of automobile consumers’ purchasing behavior, identified automobile product defects, and subdivided consumer groups. The results show that the factors affecting consumers’ car buying behavior are low fuel consumption, affordable price, superior performance, fashionable appearance, and comfortable use. Car product defects are mainly reflected in the three aspects of the car's performance, comfort, and configuration; there are six kinds of consumer groups: price seekers, fuel consumption seekers, performance seekers, comfort seekers, cost performance seekers, and appearance seekers. Of these, cost performance seekers make up the largest proportion, and they constitute the largest group of intention purchasers. These findings can help enterprises develop targeted product improvement programs, but also provide a decision‐making basis for enterprises to achieve precision marketing.

Exploring relationship among semiotic product packaging, brand experience dimensions, brand trust and purchase intentions in an Asian emerging market

PurposeOver recent years, brand semiotics have been gaining the marketing practitioners' attention for designing their brand strategy. Hence, to address this gap, the current study investigates the effect of semiotic product packaging on brand experience dimensions, brand trust and purchase intent of reputed major brands of fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) products.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this study were collected by administering a questionnaire-based survey from 254 respondents from the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) of India, using systematic sampling. Structural equation modeling has been used to test the conceptual model and examine the hypotheses developed in the study.FindingsThe results present evidence of the growing influence of semiotic product packaging upon consumer brand trust and purchase intentions. The study suggests that brand semiotics positively influence customer brand experience, brand trust and purchase intention of FMCG products.Practical implicationsThe research findings will benefit FMCG companies to identify how to apply semiotics in packaging to improve consumers' brand experience and influence intent to purchase.Originality/valueResearch in brand semiotics on product packaging is limited, as most prior studies focus on brand semiotics in advertising, product design improvement and retail design. The present study has investigated the impact of semiotics on brand experience dimensions in product packaging, which is emerging as a critical concern for the FMCG sector particularly in the post-COVID period.

DEVELOPMENT OF ENGINEERING DRAWING LEARNING MODULE FOR VOCATIONAL STUDENT AT PROPERTY CONSTRUCTION BUSINESS EXPERTISE PROGRAM

This study aims to: (1) develop the learning media for the Technical Drawing module in the engineering drawing subject of class X Property Construction Business (BKP) at SMK Negeri 1 Percut Sei Tuan, (2) To determine the validity level of the material and media as learning media for students. This study uses the Research and Development development research method which includes the stages of identifying potentials and problems, gathering information, product design, design validation, and design improvement. The instrument used was a questionnaire. This questionnaire is used to test the feasibility of the media in the module through material validation and media validation. Based on the research results it is known that the Technical Drawing module as a learning medium for Engineering Drawing subjects refers to a curriculum consisting of 6 chapters. The results of the feasibility test for material experts with an average score of 125 are in the very good category. And the results of the feasibility test for media experts with an average score of 148 are in the very good category. The results showed that the Engineering Drawing learning module was feasible to use for class X BKP students at SMK Negeri 1 Percut Sei Tuan.

Product Design for Matrix-Structured Manufacturing Systems

In recent years, the demand for smarter and more customized products has increased. Traditional manufacturing systems are typically designed for mass production, which is not suitable for producing customized products. It requires a new manufacturing system that is flexible, scalable, and reconfigurable, for example, a matrix-structured manufacturing system. As the manufacturing system and product design form a symbiotic relationship, products should also be designed for the new manufacturing system to optimize performance. This paper presents a four-stage methodology to improve the product and product family design targeted production in matrix-structured manufacturing systems. The four stages include a product family analysis, indicator calculations, product optimization, and digital twin-based verification and validation. The proposed methodology is applied in a laboratory case study. The result shows that the improved product design has a significantly higher design efficiency than the original ones. We conclude that the methodology of Design for Matrix-Structured Manufacturing Systems has a holistic view on the product family and can optimize the production efficiency in matrix-structured manufacturing systems.

USING GAMING TECH TO IMPROVE PRODUCT DESIGN

Combining digital twins with games software and the IoT can help to significantly improve product design, according to BRAD HART

PEMBERDAYAAN MASYARAKAT UMKM BERBASIS DIGITAL LITERACY DI KAMPUNG LOGAM NGINGAS KABUPATEN SIDOARJO

Abstract The quality of human resources will determine the economic improvement in each region. The problems of MSME partners are the lack of optimal human resources, public awareness about cleanliness, product design, and product quality improvement. This community empowerment has the main goal to improve the quality of Human Resources in the field of Digital Literacy in Kampung Logam Ngingas Sidoarjo Regency. More details of community service are done to help UMKM transform into the digital era. People in Kampung Logam Ngingas need to get digital literacy to be able to promote and compete in the digital market. The stage of activities is carried out for several months during the Covid-19 pandemic. The initial stage is the observation of the field of research and analyzing the core of the problems of the UMKM community in Ngingas Village, then in the next stage community service is carried out for 2 days at the Ngingas Village Head's Office. Methods carried out in community service are Focus Group Discussion (FGD), observation, and indepth interview. The results of this community service are in accordance with the external targets that have been determined and actively help 15-20 UMKM to improve the understanding of digital literacy in Kampung Logam Ngingas Sidoarjo Regency. Keywords: Community Empowerment, Digital Literacy, UMKM

Development of a modular kit to improve DFA learning

DFA (Design for assembly) is an important part of the contents included in some of the manufacturing courses taught at Jaume I University. DFA is a tool to analyse and improve product design from an assembly point of view. Although DFA contents had been covered using different teaching activities (theoretical, problem and laboratory sessions), the results in students’ assessment revealed that the expected learning outcomes were not being achieved. In particular, results were especially unsatisfactory in the practical application of DFA. Students misunderstood concepts such as “handling” and “insertion” operations, and failed at identifying assembly problems related to thickness or alignment among others. A learning by doing approach has been proved to improve students’ learning and engagement, as they take an active role and have the opportunity of doing things themselves. In a previous work, a specific modular and reconfigurable kit to improve DFA learning by experimentation was designed. Based on this work, this paper presents the analysis of the results obtained in two different courses where the modular kit has been used by students in a new seminar session.

Development of Storybook to Improve Early Children's Reading Ability

Early childhood reading skills are focused on recognizing reading materials such as magazines, daily journals, children's activity books, books of picture, animal series books, and other books that can improve children's early reading skills. This is rarely understood by some PAUD teachers in Indonesia, resulting in misunderstandings in learning activities. This research aims to develop children's story book by themes as an effort to stimulate early childhood reading skills. Another goal is to find out the feasibility of using children's story books by themes as an effort to stimulate early childhood reading skills. The methode of research used is research and development which is modified from the model developed by Borg and Gall. The research development procedure is carried out through six stages, (a) Collect of information (b) compiling product designs (c) product validation developed (d) product design improvements (e) limited product trials and (6) product results of children's story books. This research resulted in 3 children's story books entitled “Ikan Koi Si Penolong”, “Aku membantu Ayah”, and “Belanja bersama Ibu ". Three of books resulting from this development research have gone through the stages of expert validation tests by material experts with a percentage of 92.8%. Meanwhile, the media expert indicator obtained a percentage of 93.7%, which means this book is valid and can be tested on children. Then a trial was conducted by two users, namely the Al-Huda PAUD teacher in Kabupaten Tasikmalaya. The test results obtained the percentage of values of 96.8% and 93.7%, which means that books by themes are appropriate and can be used by teachers to stimulate early childhood reading skills. Keywords: Story books, Early reading, Early childhood

Riding the Digital Product Life Cycle Waves towards a Circular Economy

Data driven organizations such as Amazon and Uber have raised the capabilities and expectations of customers to a new level by providing faster and cheaper products and services. The reviewed literature documented that 10–15% of the online products are returned and in many cases such products are not shelf-ready due to product obsolescence or slight wear and tear, thereby reducing profits. Many of these products are disposed of in landfills. There were very few publications that documented how integration of digitized product life cycle into the business model improves product returns and the remanufacturing processes. As societies continue on, environmentally responsible, digital journeys with connected devices and people, reverse supply chains and remanufacturing will play increased importance in fulfilling customers expanded expectations. The networks are evolving, wherein, data are collected from all phases of the product lifecycles from design, prototype, manufacturing, usage aftermarket, returns remanufacturing and recycling. The objective of this paper’s authors was to describe how all phases of product life cycles can be digitized to improve global reverse supply chains and remanufacturing. The authors performed a literature review and developed case studies to document current and to predict future transformational waves that will become increasingly used in many industrial sectors. The authors made recommendations about the importance of improved product design, reduced processing costs and increased use of remanufactured products based upon data on returns to manufacturers and service providers. This paper contributes to research by providing a framework of a digitized product life cycle integrated with the business process phases including remanufacturing and supported with real-world case studies for practitioners and academicians. The authors outlined potential future topics for academic researchers and practitioners, for expanding usage of digital tools in real-time predictive analytics to improve remanufacturing system’s efficiency and quality.

A METHODOLOGY TO SUPPORT COMPANIES IN THE FIRST STEPS TOWARDS DE-MANUFACTURING

AbstractDe-manufacturing and re-manufacturing are fundamental technical solutions to efficiently recover value from post-use products. Disassembly in one of the most complex activities in de-manufacturing because i) the more manual it is the higher is its cost, ii) disassembly times are variable due to uncertainty of conditions of products reaching their EoL, and iii) because it is necessary to know which components to disassemble to balance the cost of disassembly. The paper proposes a methodology that finds ways of applications: it can be applied at the design stage to detect space for product design improvements, and it also represents a baseline from organizations approaching de-manufacturing for the first time. The methodology consists of four main steps, in which firstly targets components are identified, according to their environmental impact; secondly their disassembly sequence is qualitatively evaluated, and successively it is quantitatively determined via disassembly times, predicting also the status of the component at their End of Life. The aim of the methodology is reached at the fourth phase when alternative, eco-friendlier End of Life strategies are proposed, verified, and chosen.

PENGEMBANGAN HERBARIUM TUMBUHAN YANG DIGUNAKAN DALAM UPACARA ADAT TINGKEBAN DI KABUPATEN JOMBANG

This study aims to determine the results of the validation of herbarium experts and learning media experts on the developed plant herbarium. The types of plants used as herbarium specimens are plants used in the Tingkeban traditional ceremony carried out by the community in Jombang Regency. This research is a development research that refers to the R&D model which consists of 10 stages, but only the first five stages were carried out in this study. The five stages are potential and problems, information gathering, product design, design validation, and design improvement. The instruments used are interview guides and validation sheets that are adjusted to the expertise of each validator. There are two validation sheets used, namely the herbarium expert validation sheet and the learning media expert validation sheet. The data that has been collected was analyzed descriptively. The results showed that the developed herbarium obtained a score of 80 with the criteria quite feasible from the herbarium expert, and obtained a score of 95 with the criteria very feasible from the learning media expert. This shows that the herbarium developed can be used as a medium for learning biology, after going through a process of improvement based on suggestions from the two validators.

Customer preferences extraction for air purifiers based on fine-grained sentiment analysis of online reviews

Consumers are increasingly caring about air quality, and the air purifier market is facing fierce competition. In the era of e-commerce, it is possible to improve product design and enhance competitiveness by mining consumer demands for product functions from online reviews. However, the existing aspect-level sentiment analysis methods fail to deal with the over-segmentation of multi-word aspects, which is likely to cause the omission of aspects. Moreover, there is still a gap between sentiment analysis and demand recognition. To overcome these limitations, we propose an approach based on fine-grained sentiment analysis and the Kano model to extract consumer demands for product attributes from online reviews. Specifically, a recognition method based on part-of-speech rules is presented to identify multi-word product attributes. Inspired by the Kano model, extraction rules are designed to identify consumer demands for product attributes from the results of sentiment analysis. Finally, online reviews of air purifiers in Chinese market crawled from T-mall.com are used to illustrate the proposed approach. The correlation results show that there exists significantly positive correlation between product sales and the extracted attractive and one-dimensional product attributes. This indirectly demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Another dataset of refrigerators is further used to check the robustness of our proposed approach, and the results further demonstrate the effectiveness.

A new method for estimating the refrigerant distribution in plate evaporator based on infrared thermal imaging

For plate heat exchangers (PHEs) used in refrigeration, the uniformity of fluid distribution is an important factor affecting heat transfer performance and system stability. This paper presents an experiment for infrared monitoring of plate evaporators with R410a as refrigerant, and proposed a processing method for the obtained thermal images to comprehensively estimate the channel-to-channel refrigerant maldistribution and the in-channel refrigerant maldistribution. In the experiment, the thermal images of the side and end surfaces of evaporators were taken with an infrared camera, and on-site calibration of infrared temperature measurement was carried out. Then a simplified evaporator model representing the division of refrigerant two-phase region and superheating region was established using the modified thermal images. Based on the model, the volume proportions of both regions and the area of the boundary surface between two-phase region and superheating region were calculated. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of the new method proposed above, a case study was carried out. Two similar evaporators were tested, one with distributor and the other without. It was shown that the uniformity improvement of refrigerant distribution revealed by larger volume proportion of two-phase region was significantly relevant with better heat transfer performance. The method provides a new tool for PHE manufacturers to improve product design and for refrigeration system manufacturers to evaluate the operational state of plate evaporators.