Verifying dynamic Kano’s model to support new product/service development

Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, Jul 2018

Purpose: Although firms try to shorten time-to-market, the duration of product development projects might anyway jeopardize the assumptions made at the beginning of the design process. This includes the definition of product attributes for ensuring customer satisfaction, thus forecasting techniques could be worthwhile. Within Kano’s method, trajectories of quality attributes have been identified and they can be potentially useful to the scope, but they have not been carefully verified.Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes on the above verification challenge by exploring studies of customer satisfaction conducted by means of Kano’s model regarding manifold industrial fields. The paper focuses on changes in the relevance of customer requirements reported in different contributions and analyses data statistically.Findings: The dynamic trajectories outlined in Kano’s model are partially confirmed and they are valuable in the mid-term to predict changes in customer preferences. The use of quantitative indicators portraying the extent of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction leads to more reliable predictions.Research limitations/implications: In order to use as many data as possible, information has been used from different industrial fields, which can exhibit different paces in changes of customer preferences.Practical implications: The results benefit firms willing to have a clearer picture of customer main drivers for customer satisfaction at the time of market launch, although customer surveys are conducted at the beginning of product development projects.Originality/value: The paper puts into question previous assumptions about modifications of customer preferences, which, however are just empirically supported and assesses how these can be exploited in a reliable way.

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Verifying dynamic Kano’s model to support new product/service development

Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management JIEM 2013-0953 Verifying Dynamic Kano's Model to Support New Product/Service Development Yuri Borgianni 0 0 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Science and Technology , Italy Purpose: Although firms try to shorten time-to-market, the duration of product development projects might anyway jeopardize the assumptions made at the beginning of the design process. This includes the definition of product attributes for ensuring customer satisfaction, thus forecasting techniques could be worthwhile. Within Kano's method, trajectories of quality attributes have been identified and they can be potentially useful to the scope, but they have not been carefully verified. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes on the above verification challenge by exploring studies of customer satisfaction conducted by means of Kano's model regarding manifold industrial fields. The paper focuses on changes in the relevance of customer requirements reported in different contributions and analyses data statistically. Findings: The dynamic trajectories outlined in Kano's model are partially confirmed and they are valuable in the mid-term to predict changes in customer preferences. The use of quantitative indicators portraying the extent of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction leads to more reliable predictions. Research limitations/implications: In order to use as many data as possible, information has been gathered from different industrial fields, which can exhibit different paces in changes of customer preferences. Practical implications: The results benefit firms willing to have a clearer picture of customer main drivers for customer satisfaction at the time of market launch, although customer surveys are conducted at the beginning of product development projects. Originality/value: The paper puts into question previous assumptions about modifications of customer preferences, which, however are just empirically supported and assesses how these can be exploited in a reliable way. Kano's theory; customer requirements; customer satisfaction; product design; dynamic preferences; forecasting 1. Introduction and Motivation of the Work Kano?s theory of attractive quality (Kano, Seraku, Takahashi & Tsuji, 1984) is an important reference in the field of quality management, as underlined by numerous recent research studies from this domain that have exploited its findings in both product and service domains, e.g. (Kim, Geum & Park, 2017; Potra, Izvercian, Pugna & Dahlgaard, 2017; Sohn, Woo & Kim, 2017) . A standard method originating from the theoretical fundamentals represents an effective approach to helping understand the potentiality of each customer requirement by emphasizing the asymmetric relationship between performance and perceived satisfaction. This is achieved by defining a specific category of quality attributes for each customer requirement according to its capability to excite and/or avoid severe dissatisfaction if unfulfilled. Details will be provided in Section 2. The increasing role of Kano?s method is well explained in the review paper authored by Witell, L?fgren and Dahlgaard (2013 ). The same source witnesses an ongoing explosion phase for the employment of the model and clarifies how we are likely on the verge of an explanatory research phase. The scholars address various theoretical and practical aspects requiring close investigation that include the lifecycle of quality attributes. Kano (2001) has outlined regularities in the dynamics of customer preferences and quality attributes, as widely discussed in (L?fgren, Witell & Gustafsson, 2011) . However, empirical validation of these dynamic mechanisms is still required and this justifies the call for more insightful understanding. It is worth highlighting that a better comprehension of the evolution of quality attributes would enable the prediction of the future relationship between fulfilled product/service requirements and displayed customer satisfaction. This can represent a great contribution in the field of product/service design especially with regard to those companies that carry out New Product Development (NPD) initiatives by entrusting the so-called Voice of the Customer (VoC). In these situations, customers play a fundamental decision-making role, being asked to provide feedback about new products or single characteristics. Changes in customer preferences are viable to invalidate the decisions made at the beginning of NPD tasks (Bacciotti, Borgianni, Cascini & Rotini, 2016) especially when much time elapses from the project start to the market launch (Chong & Chen, 2010); their effects can be already displayed during the supply chain phase (Marsillac & Roh, 2014). As a result, it might happen that firms launch products in the market fulfilling customer requirements whose importance has been verified just during the product development process, as suggested by Figure 1. Based on th (...truncated)


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Yuri Borgianni. Verifying dynamic Kano’s model to support new product/service development, Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 2018, pp. 569-587, Volume 11, Issue 3, DOI: 10.3926/jiem.2591