A Possibilistic Approach for Aggregating Customer Opinions in Product Development

Abstract

One of the major tasks of product development is to collect the opinions of potential customers and to then find out the status of certain product features. The status of a product feature means whether or not it must, should, or could be included in the product, or even avoided. In doing so, a simple relative frequency-based computing approach is not sufficient. Rather, a logical computing approach is a better option. Based on this contemplation, this study describes a methodology to identify the status of a product feature in terms of must-be, should-be, or could-be categories, where the collected customer opinions are computed using a logical approach. Possibility distributions (i.e., fuzzy numbers) play a significant role in the logical computation. A Kano-model-based questionnaire is employed to collect the customer opinions. Through a case study, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach is effective in dealing with both the subjectivity and controversy that the customer opinions may exhibit. The results of this study are useful for making decisions in the early stage of a product development process in a lucid manner.