Engineering Soft Reliability in Product Realization

Abstract

Understanding customers-in-context for actual product realization processes (PRPs) has become a pressing need since a large and rapidly increasing share of complaints in the field cannot be attributed to violation of products’ technical specifications. While addressing this problem requires a multidisciplinary approach, more studies in the engineering design domain have of late been proposed on engineering contextual and emotional values in product design. However, it is not yet clear how these findings can be utilized within large-scale operational PRPs. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose an operational method empowering the stakeholders in collaborative PRPs with core decision templates, which provide (i) relevant information on customers-in-context, and (ii) corresponding guidelines to improve underlying processes. The content of these templates builds on the results of user feedback analysis with the subjective-feedback ontology from Soft Reliability, and their structure is based on the compromise Decision-Support Problem templates. Partial application of our method is demonstrated through two industrial cases. We envision that our method can help to evaluate and foresee the impact of new technology as it gets incorporated into the specific ecology of values and activities of its users.