Evaluating the Effects of Poorly Performed Product Development Phases on Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

The research of the authors within product development is addressed at developing a tool for innovation in industry, namely Integrated Product and Process Re-engineering (IPPR), whose overall objective is enhancing and harmonizing ideation, design and manufacturing with a product lifecycle approach. The module of IPPR indicated as Process Value Analysis (PVA) is aimed at ranking the phases of a business process according to their contribution to customer satisfaction with respect to the employed resources. The original contribution of the present paper is complementing the method with information concerning drops in customer satisfaction as a result of poorly performed process phases. By accepting the non-linear relationship between satisfaction and attributes’ quality level and the different roles played by customer requirements according to Kano categories, the authors propose a preliminary method to provide quantitative evaluations of the effects of process phases that do not thoroughly fulfil the intended objectives. An exemplary application here presented refers to the cosmetic industry, by investigating the production process of lipsticks, to which PVA was previously applied with encouraging outcomes.