Tolerancing subjective and uncertain customer requirements regarding perceived product quality

Abstract

Defining “quality” from customers’ perspective and controlling it throughout the product development process is a fuzzy and enduring task, especially for companies that are, simultaneously, fighting cost pressure and shortening product and technology life cycles. The poor predictability of customer demands complicates the definition of established requirements. During the product development process, product experts interpret the customer requirements and transfer them into product specifications. Due to the subjective nature of customer demands and the vast field of human perception, a huge number of product parameters have to be analyzed and specified to assure a comprehensive and successful approach. In order to keep an adequate cost–value ratio in production, it is not possible to pinpoint “hard” tolerances for each parameter. This article depicts the structured approach to choose the parameters, which are relevant for the customers’ quality judgment, and to tolerance “soft” customer perceptions. The emphasis lies on defining and scaling product parameters by combining product tests, interviews and focus groups for evaluation and interpretation by statistical means. Furthermore, the gathered information will be transferred into a “describing” specification, which will be supported by a tolerancing process based on statistical means.

Consumer perceptions on satisfaction and word of mouth in smallholder horticultural stores in an emerging economy

“…This study justifies perceived product quality as an essential construct to explore since the smallholding horticultural store produces local products. Ultimately, perceived product quality determines whether customer's expectations of the product have been achieved (Quattelbaum et al, 2013). Razak et al (2016) state that consumers perceive products to be of good quality if they are associated with their expectations, leading to their satisfaction.…”

Perceived Quality Evaluation with the Use of Extended Reality

“…Both approaches share a common agreement -they see perceived ICED19 quality as the antagonistic entity to "real" or "objective" quality (i.e., not quantifiable, imaginary, subjective). Only recently an erratic shift towards "objectification" of the perceived quality concept has been spotted, with some scholars proposing quantification approaches to perceived quality (Golder et al, 2012;Quattelbaum et al, 2013;Amini et al, 2016). Alas, the majority of the proposed models require further development of practical methods and tools for industrial use in product development.…”

Perceived quality framework in product generation engineering: an automotive industry example

“…Both approaches share a common agreement -they see perceived quality as the antagonistic entity to 'real' or 'objective' quality (i.e., not quantifiable, imaginary, subjective). Only recently an erratic shift towards 'objectification' of the perceived quality concept has been spotted, with some scholars proposing quantification approaches to perceived quality (Golder, Mitra & Moorman 2012;Quattelbaum et al 2013;Amini et al 2016).…”

“…Only recently an erratic shift towards ‘objectification’ of the perceived quality concept has been spotted, with some scholars proposing quantification approaches to perceived quality (Golder, Mitra & Moorman 2012; Quattelbaum et al. 2013; Amini et al. 2016).…”