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Introduction
In today's competitive market, most products are used under an uncertain environment, which inevitably affect expected lifecycle of products or even cause product obsolescence (Cardin et al., 2016; Gopsill et al., 2016; Li et al., 2021a). As an effective solution, redesign is vital to product research and development process (Janz et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2012; Uckun et al., 2014). Driven by sufficient competitiveness in marketplace, the mission for product redesign is pursuing higher customer satisfaction (Zhang et al., 2019a).
Customer satisfaction depends on fulfilment level of customer requirements (CRs) (He et al., 2017; Li et al., 2020) that closely relates to the fulfilment level of design parameters (DPs) (Felfernig and Schubert, 2011; Jiang et al., 2019; He et al., 2021). With the analysis of correlations between CRs and DPs by quality function deployment (QFD), the relative importance of each DP to CRs is calculated (Wang et al., 2019a). In the product development process, customer satisfaction is sensitive to different fulfilment levels of CRs (Ye et al., 2014; Li et al., 2021b). Motivated by this observation, the sensitivity of final customer satisfaction to the variations of DPs is worth exploring. Sensitivity of customer satisfaction toward a DP is defined as the relative fluctuation of customer satisfaction caused by unit change of the DP. Differ from the importance of DPs, sensitivity of customer satisfaction toward DPs focuses on fluctuation of customer satisfaction. Typically, realizing an important DP may contribute more to customer satisfaction. However, customer satisfaction may remain immobility even if the DP is further improved. To redesign obsolete products in a cost-effective manner, we concern DPs with highly sensitive impact on customer satisfaction as critical ones. In product redesign, designers should choose and address critical DPs for achieving optimal customer satisfaction with minimum modification cost. By injecting customer satisfaction sensitivity, the optimal improvement of customer satisfaction in product redesign can be achieved. However, a common principle of customer satisfaction modeling is establishing a linear additive value function that integrates the relative importance and fulfilment level of DPs, while not considering the sensitivity of customer satisfaction. A research gap still remains...