Customer requirements elicitation and management for product conceptualization

Abstract

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. In this work, a customer requirements elicitation and management system (CREAMS) is proposed to effectively support product conceptualization decisions by integrating various multidisciplinary requirements and concerns. A CREAMS prototype that comprises two-modules has been proposed for the purpose of eliciting and managing customer requirements for developing product concepts. During the process of customer requirements elicitation, the web-based survey is conducted to obtain customer information. The intelligent agent (IA), which comprises a pattern recognition engine and a query engine, is employed for further customer requirements evaluation and management. The system has been illustrated using a case study on the design of golf wood club head. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.