Journal
RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING DESIGN-THEORY APPLICATIONS AND CONCURRENT ENGINEERING
Volume 14, Issue 3, Pages 119-130Publisher
SPRINGER-VERLAG LONDON LTD
DOI: 10.1007/s00163-003-0032-6
Keywords
voice of customers; customer requirements acquisition and evaluation; laddering technique; radial basis function neural network
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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.
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