A continuous fuzzy Kano’s model for customer requirements analysis in product development

Abstract

In today’s competitive marketplace, customer requirements (CRs) analysis is critically important in the development phase of a new product. One widely used effective tool for CRs analysis is Kano’s model. However, this model only considers crisp descriptions, ignoring the fact that CRs are imprecise and uncertain due to their linguistic origins. Moreover, it provides limited decision support for designers because it is a qualitative method based on discontinuous classification criteria. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes a continuous fuzzy Kano’s model to more accurately analyse CRs. A modified fuzzy Kano’s questionnaire is developed to deal with the imprecision and uncertainty in CRs. It is a self-administered paper questionnaire that consists of closed-ended questions. Furthermore, a continuous approach for fuzzy Kano evaluation is presented to quantitatively analyse CRs. Also, an evaluation index is introduced that allows CRs to be prioritized. A case study of mobile phone development is presented to evaluate the proposed method.