Title
Consumer driven product technology function deployment using social media and patent mining.
Abstract
The capability of identifying real-time customer needs is critical for manufacturers that provide short life cycle consumer products such as smart phones. Companies need to form research and development (R&D) strategies to improve key functional features for short lifespan products to reflect the adoption of innovative technologies and changing customer expectations. With the pervasive use of the Internet, this research crawls and analyzes the online voice of customers (VoC), overcoming the time lag of offline surveys, to identify and prioritize product functions for deployment using extended quality function deployment (eQFD) models. In this research, the novel analytics of the manufacturer’s patent portfolio is added as an additional eQFD dimension to map ranked functional improvements to a manufacturer’s R&D capabilities. Thus, a computer supported eQFD system is developed to perform the unique mappings and gap analyses between the VoC, the prioritized product functions, and the manufacturer’s patent portfolio. The newly developed eQFD methodology and its novel discoveries are demonstrated in detail using a case study of three smart phones launched during the same time frame. The products include the Samsung Galaxy S7, the Huawei Honor 5X, and the ASUS Zenfone 3. The newly developed methodology is generally applicable to support VoC-centric product function deployment and R&D strategic planning in other domains.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.aei.2018.03.004
Advanced Engineering Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web mining,Data mining,Quality function deployment (QFD),Patent analysis,Voice of the customer,Latent semantic analysis
Software deployment,Web mining,Systems engineering,Voice of the customer,Engineering management,Quality function deployment,Patent portfolio,Engineering,Analytics,Strategic planning,The Internet
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
36
1474-0346
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amy J. C. Trappey134848.23
Charles V. Trappey236244.98
Chin-Yuan Fan347328.27
Ian J. Y. Lee410.35