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Customer Focussed Technology Selection Using Expert Opinion. Incorporating the 'Voice of the Customer' and Expert Opinion in Technology Selection.
Richardson, David
Richardson, David
Publication Date
2018
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The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Peer-Reviewed
Open Access status
Accepted for publication
Institution
University of Bradford
Department
Faculty of Engineering and Informatics
Awarded
2018
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Abstract
The application of new technologies into products allows manufacturers to
differentiate their products and fulfil customer requirements. A method to assess the
impact of technologies on the fulfilment of customer requirements has been
investigated in this research. The main focus is the application of advanced
technologies, which may be still in the concept phase, to complex systems using
automotive engines as case studies. In these systems the customer will not directly
interact with the technologies but the technologies are applied to deliver the range of
customer requirements individually or collectively.
A standard tool, Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) has been adopted to capture
the customer requirements. As all the technology combinations cannot be assessed
experimentally due to resource limitations, expert opinion has been employed. A
questionnaire has been developed to capture the experts’ opinions of the
performance of the technologies in a non-linear Likert-type scale. The combination of
expert opinion, where the experts are specialists in a range of engineering
disciplines, has been considered and analysis methods incorporating opinion
weighting have been developed that parallel established expert opinion analysis
methods used for subjective probability risk analysis.
The analysis methods enabled different technology combinations to be assessed and
customer requirements for different target products to be incorporated to provide a
route for optimum technology selection to fulfil customer requirements.
A pilot study and two case studies were used to investigate the methodology with
Customer feedback used to validate the output in one of the case studies.
The research has shown that the Customer Focussed Technology Selection
framework and methodology developed in this thesis is a new approach to selecting
technologies. The case studies have demonstrated it is an effective framework for
evaluating the impact of low technology-readiness-level technologies in complex
systems on the Customer. The methodology is suitable for application in technology
development processes such as the Jaguar Land Rover TCDS process to support
the initial technology selection.
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Type
Thesis
Qualification name
PhD