Incorporating customer satisfaction into the decision-making process of product configuration: a fuzzy Kano perspective

In an era of global customisation, buyers continuously benefit from the flexibility of selecting their desired options when making decisions on purchasing. Most manufacturing companies, however, need to balance the trade-offs between enhancing product variety and controlling manufacturing cost. In order to fulfil the goal of market-oriented product development, customer satisfaction needs to be well incorporated into the decision-making process of product configuration. Therefore, a hybrid framework is presented to address two critical issues in new product development: customer satisfaction and product configuration. In the beginning, fuzzy Kano model is employed to elicit customer perception of product attributes and extract customer satisfaction. Consecutively, information entropy is used for deriving the important weights of product attributes. Lastly, by means of Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution, competing design alternatives are efficiently prioritised and configured. In particular, a case study on configuring varieties of smart pads is demonstrated to justify the validity of the proposed framework. With consideration of and the pricing policies of multi-segments, a systematic framework to effectively bridge customer satisfaction and product configuration is offered for the academics and industrial practitioners.