Chun-Hsien Chen

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.

A strategy for acquiring customer requirement patterns using laddering technique and ART2 neural network

With the increasing interest and emphasis on customer demands in new product development, customer requirements elicitation (CRE) and evaluation have secured a crucial position in the early stage of product conceptualization. As such, it is highly desired to have a systematic strategy for soliciting customer requirements effectively, and subsequently, analyzing customer orientations quantitatively. For this purpose, a customer-oriented approach has accordingly been proposed and investigated in this study. It concerns both breadth and depth perspectives of customer requirements acquisition as well as customer and marketing analysis. This prototype system comprises two interrelated components, namely, the CRE and the customer/marketing analysis (CMA) modules. The process starts from the voice of customers and ends with the identified opportunities from marketing analysis. In the prototype system, the laddering technique has been employed to enable CRE via the so-called customer attributes hierarchy (CAM). In addition, the adaptive resonance theory, particularly ART2, neural network has been applied as a toolkit for further customer and marketing analysis. A case study on wood golf club design is used to demonstrate and validate this approach. q 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Project scheduling for collaborative product development using DSM

Abstract New Product Development (NPD) is an important and complex business process. It constitutes a major contributor to the business excellence of any industry. In recent years, NPD has become more and more competitive and globalised. However, scheduling and managing the global collaborated NPD process for large projects is a difficult exercise that requires much effort and experience. An examination of current project scheduling tools reveals the weakness in various areas, such as sequencing, monitoring and controlling the NPD process. This paper presents a project scheduling and rescheduling framework based on DSM (Design Structure Matrix) to deal with the weakness mentioned. An example is provided to illustrate the proposed framework.

A numerical algorithm of fuzzy reliability

Abstract In this paper, a computational model of fuzzy reliability focusing on solving the engineering problems with random general stress–fuzzy general strength is presented. The mathematical basis of this computational model is that the fuzzy probability can be computed with the computational method of conventional probability by use of a mathematical transition. Based on this computational model, a numerical algorithm is given which can be applied to compute the fuzzy reliability of mechanical components, sensors, electronic units, etc. This establishes a basis for the reliability analysis of systems consisting of components with fuzzy reliability. As an example, a case study about the fuzzy reliability analysis of a kind of sensor used in railway systems is provided to verify the logic of this algorithm. The computation results show that this algorithm fits the engineering experience.

PDCS-a product definition and customisation system for product concept development

In recent years, owing to the rapid changing customer needs and much shorter product life cycle than ever before, employing more efficient and flexible approaches for product concept development has become an imperative for a successful product. This work aims at establishing a novel product definition and customisation system (PDCS) for organisations to meet this demand in todays competitive and globalised business climate. A prototype PDCS is proposed, from a design knowledge-handling viewpoint, in this paper. It comprises two phases, namely, product definition using the laddering technique and a novel design knowledge hierarchy (DKH), and product customisation using an integrated methodology of conjoint analysis (CA) and Kohonen association (KA) techniques. Basically, this system is a method of making design decisions via customer involvement, i.e. a strategy for transferring customer preference into a specific product concept. A case study on wood golf club design has been used to illustrate and validate the PDCS. The details of the validation are discussed.

An investigation into affective design using sorting technique and Kohonen self-organising map

In this paper, a prototype system that focuses on affective design perspective for iterative product concept development is proposed and described. The prototype system, which emphasises the solicitation of affective attributes from customers, employs a sorting technique, i.e. picture sorts, for acquiring customers affective requirements and a hierarchical structure for representing designers formal elements to meet customers affective requirements in product conceptualisation. As hierarchical structure alone contains qualitative and uncertain inherence, a self-organised algorithm known as Kohonen self-organising map (SOM) neural network is employed to consolidate the relationship between affective requirements from customers and formal elements from designers so as to formulate a customer-oriented product concept. The performance of the prototype system is illustrated by using a case study on the design of a mobile hand phone.

A QFD-enabled product conceptualisation approach via design knowledge hierarchy and RCE neural network

In this paper, an approach that attempts to improve conventional quality function deployment (QFD) technique in terms of effective design knowledge handling in product concept development is proposed and described. For this purpose, a QFD-enabled product conceptualisation system was established. It consists of three cohesively interacting modules, namely, design knowledge elicitation module using laddering technique, design knowledge representation module using design knowledge hierarchy (DKH), and design knowledge organisation module using restricted Coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. A case study on wood golf club design was used to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach. From the case study, the prototype QFD-enabled product conceptualisation system has demonstrated its effectiveness in design knowledge acquisition, representation and organisation at an early stage of NPD. The details of the validation are discussed.

An investigation on a prototype customer-oriented information system for product concept development

Abstract In a competitive and globalised business environment, a company can never out-perform its competitors, if it depends solely on its products alone. As a result, customer needs become an important factor to consider in new product development. In this work, a customer-oriented information system (COIS) was investigated and employed to establish a closer link between product re-innovation and customer involvement in the context of product concept development. It is aimed at improving design efficiency through managing multilevel product information, and reducing time and cost. In order to expedite the implementation of such an information system, a so-called functional attributes hierarchy (FAH) was proposed and developed to elicit product concepts and relevant design specifications from both generic and specific viewpoints. The correlation between them in terms of individual customer requirements was also identified with the utilisation of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique. In addition, an object-oriented technique that enables information stored in a relational database (RDB) to be accessed was developed. The development is aimed at eliminating the semantic gaps between the data model and engineering designs. A case study on wood golf club design was carried out to validate the bespoke COIS for product concept development.

A web-enhanced dynamic BOM-based available-to-promise system

Abstract This paper describes a Web-enhanced dynamic BOM-based available-to-promise (ATP) system, which provides manufacturing companies with the ability to support the decision made by production planners and managers. In the paper, a concept of dynamic BOM is proposed. Based on the concept, the ATP computation algorithm is modeled and described in detail. Subsequently, the development of a prototype system is introduced. The system scenarios, system structure, architecture and some implementation issues are also presented. With the advent of Internet technologies, the proposed Web-enhanced dynamic BOM-based ATP system is simple to use and user-friendly. It supports centric management and can easily integrate with other applications.

A knowledge sorting process for a product design expert system

Knowledge sorting is one way to organize the knowledge acquired from the domain expert(s) and various sources. Well-organized knowledge representation will make rule extraction much easier. This paper describes a knowledge sorting process that was developed to facilitate the rule extraction for a product design expert system. The process capitalizes on the relationships between design attributes and factors, dependent and independent variables, and consists of three stages: identification of knowledge sources, generation of taxonomic trees, and organization of acquired knowledge. An example applies the sorting process to the development of an expert system for the design of wood head golf clubs.