Customer Focussed Technology Selection Using Expert Opinion. Incorporating the 'Voice of the Customer' and Expert Opinion in Technology Selection.

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.