Ten tools for customer-driven product development in industrial companies (original) (raw)

Customer Needs in Market-Driven Product Development: Product Management and R&D Standpoints

Technology and Investment, 2014

Meeting customer needs is considered to be vital for new product success. This study explores customer need identification and related challenges in product management and research and development (R&D) in a market-driven context, where a large number of customers exist. This paper reviews the literature on customer interaction and needs in a product development context. Despite the rich literature, product management and R&D angle have not been sufficiently addressed. Thus, customer need identification and challenges from product management and R&D managers' perspectives are studied in two new product development (NPD) projects: one in business-to-business (B2B) and the other in business-to-consumer (B2C) market. While differences between B2B and B2C markets exist, the results indicate that product management professionals must collaborate with various stakeholders and utilize many information sources to obtain and interpret diverging customer needs. Recommended practices for companies to tackle various customer-need related challenges include systematic ways of working, small cross-functional teams in product definition, and avoiding early handovers between product management and R&D. Besides internal collaboration, product management and R&D professionals should aim for some direct contact with selected external customers to clarify the real and project specific needs, and to build overall understanding about customers.

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 industries alike. This paper 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.

Understanding Customer Needs to Engineer Product-Service Systems

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2014

Starting from the 90s, an increasing number of companies have been starting to move from a product-centric perspective towards Product-Service-System (PSS). In this context, suitable models, methods and tools to collect, engineer and embed in a single solution all the knowledge that meets or exceeds people's emotional needs and expectations are required. Despite that, only few authors have proposed methodologies that can be easily adopted by industrial companies to design and engineer a product-service solution starting from the customer needs. Thus, this paper focuses on the customer needs analysis and aims at proposing a methodology to support companies in identifying customer needs, representing the starting point to the engineering and/or reengineering of PSS offering and the related delivery processes. An industrial case study in ABB S.p.A. has been carried out in order to test the methodology.

Learning How To Identify Customer Requirements: A Key Component Of Product Development Courses

2004 Annual Conference Proceedings

A crucial step in the process to develop a new product is the identification of the customer requirements. The outcomes from this step strongly influence both the rest of the development effort and the ultimate success or failure of the product. When students work in teams in product development (PD) projects, they often tend to start generating solution concepts right away without carefully identifying all the stakeholders that must be taken into consideration, determining all the customer needs, and establishing their relative importance. The reason for this may be twofold. First, many engineering students believe that in their professional career they will seldom be actively involved in the identification of the customer needs. Second, it is more appealing for engineering students to embark in the creative and open-ended process of concept generation than to spend time interacting with customers to establish their true expectations. The problem is that, in the "real world," an engineer working in PD needs to be substantially involved in the process of identifying product requirements. In addition, without direct interaction with the customers, it is not possible to have a clear understanding of what they want. This, in turn, usually leads to the selection of a product concept that either fails to satisfy some key customer expectations or sub-optimally trades-off one attribute against another. To overcome the problems stated above, it is important to emphasize in PD courses a formal process to identify customer needs. Furthermore, students must apply what they learn so that they can really acquire the knowledge and skills required to successfully complete this task. To explore the benefits of this approach, a formal process to actively identify customer requirements was introduced into a sophomore PD course, a senior capstone design course, and a graduate level course in PD. Although the level of interest demonstrated by the teams varied, some of them managed to understand the customer requirements at a level that was above the instructor's expectations. In this paper, the approach followed, the results obtained, and suggestions for future improvement are discussed in the context of projects carried out by the students.

Development Process with Regard to Customer Requirements

Concurrent Engineering, 2006

Today, it can be maintained that the customer is a 'king' as he will buy only the products that satisfy his needs and wants. The companies of today are facing new challenges: global business and local operation, standardization, and individualization of products, demanding customers and fierce competition. The company wants to achieve shorter product development time, lower costs, high quality of the product, and finally, customer satisfaction. In order to achieve the set goals, the company has to take into account the customers wants and needs during the new-product-development process. This article presents the mode of description of processes that allow recognition of suitable natural systems and their transformation into technical systems and a model for management of development process. The phases of quality functions deployment (QFD) during the new product development process along with the location for collecting customer needs and wants are presented. A detailed description is given on information resources for obtaining data on customer needs; the methods for obtaining, structuring, and evaluation of the data obtained. The results of testing the proposed methodology of taking into account the voice of the customer in the process of developing a new Vario Flow product in a company that produces and sells medical equipment in domestic and foreign markets are also included.

A GDSS based approach for the assessment of customer needs in industrial markets

International Journal of Production Economics, 2004

Need assessment is a critical success factor of product development in all companies; developing the right product requires an accurate understanding of customer needs. All available information about customer needs should be carefully assessed in the early phases of product development.In this paper we study the usefulness and usability of a Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) in the assessment of customers’ needs in industrial companies. We studied two real-world need assessment cases carried out in cooperation with a Finnish telecommunications company. These cases focused on the assessment of the lead users’ needs for new types of applications based on wireless technologies. GDSS technology offered many benefits for promoting the assessment of industrial customer needs. These case experiences will be described more profoundly in this paper.

A methodology for extracting dimensional requirements for a product from customer needs

The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2004

Dimensional requirements greatly influence the performance of a product, yet there is no systematic process for determining them. Often as a result, some dimensional requirements are overlooked at the design stage, which forces costly changes at a latter stage of product realisation (such as manufacture and assembly). A methodology is presented here which will assist extracting the dimensional requirements for a product from the customers' needs. It is suitable for use in a Concurrent Engineering (CE) environment and incorporates some of the existing methodologies used in CE viz. quality function deployment, tree diagrams (The New Seven Tools) and Pugh's concept selection method. It provides a systematic way of determining the dimensional requirements of a product and establishes clear links between customer needs and the dimensional requirements. These links will help the CE team to understand the product requirements and how they are to be satisfied through the dimensional aspects of a design.

Need driven product development in team-based projects

Proceedings of the 16th International conference on engineering design: ICED, 2007

In this paper, practical activities of Needfinding-an intertwined approach to identifying needs and to visualizing idea concepts in early design-are described and discussed. This is done primarily to gain an increased understanding of the various representations of user needs that are fed into the fuzzy front-end activities of team-based product innovation projects. The empirical basis comes from a study of an eight-month collaborative product development project, performed under realistic conditions by MSc ...

Product-service systems–from customer needs to requirements in early development phases

Proceedings of the 1st CIRP Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) Conference, 2009

Framed by Product-Service Systems (PSS), this paper discuss how needs and requirements are applied in early phases. In product development literature these and closely related terms are mixed, and a focus on gathering customer information about goods and their use guides the development team. This theoretical study highlights that lifecycle commitments such as PSS insist on the generation of a broader information basis. The application of a divergent view on goods, their use and the customers is likely to provide such information ...