To increase customers'satisfaction and promote product's competitiveness,a customized extended warranty(EW)policy is proposed,where the diversities in both the usage rate and purchase date are considered.The m...To increase customers'satisfaction and promote product's competitiveness,a customized extended warranty(EW)policy is proposed,where the diversities in both the usage rate and purchase date are considered.The marginal approach is applied to describe the product's two-dimensional failure in terms of age and usage,respectively.Moreover,minimal repair is adopted to restore the failure,and the virtual age method is applied to depict the effect of preventive maintenance(PM).On this basis,an optimization model is established to minimize the maintenance cost and warranty cost from the manufacturer's view,and multiple factors are taken into account,including the PM's intensity and its period,and EW's interval,etc.A numerical case study is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.The results show that by considering the product's usage rate and the purchasing date of EW,the number of failures as well as the cost of maintenance and warranty can be reduced effectively.展开更多
The multistage queue model was developed for a situation where parallel and unrelated queues exist at the first stage only. These queues merged into single queues at the remaining stages. The parallel queues offer ser...The multistage queue model was developed for a situation where parallel and unrelated queues exist at the first stage only. These queues merged into single queues at the remaining stages. The parallel queues offer services that are different from one another and customers arrive to join the queue that offer services that they need. The mathematical model was developed assuming an M/M/1 queue system and the measures of effectiveness were derived. The model was applied to solve the problem of customer congestion in a restaurant in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria that serves three different local delicacies. The three local delicacies constitute three different queues at the first stage. The second stage consists of only one queue which is for purchase of drinks and the third stage which is the last stage is for payment. Every customer in the restaurant passes through the three stages. Utilization factors for the five queues were determined and found to range from 70% to 97%. The average time spent by customers in the system was found to be 543.04 minutes. A simulation study using what-if scenario analysis was performed to determine the optimum service configuration for the system. The optimum configuration reduced average time for customers in the system from 543.04 minutes to 13.47 minutes without hiring new servers.展开更多
The identification of customer needs is one of the important first⁃step works for product design.Contrary to explicit ones,the implicit customer needs are less obvious,thus relying on the designers to discover.Up till...The identification of customer needs is one of the important first⁃step works for product design.Contrary to explicit ones,the implicit customer needs are less obvious,thus relying on the designers to discover.Up till now,there still lacks a rational or systematic method on the identification of implicit customer needs.Designers have to rely on their own intuition and personal experience to do the work,hindering the product design and development further on.Therefore,it is necessary to study the implicit customer needs and their identification methods.To this end,this paper first studies the characteristics of implicit needs,and clarifies the relationship between implicit needs and explicit needs.Based on this,the concept of customer needs life cycle is put forward.After that,two methods for the identification of implicit needs are proposed,including an active approach and a passive approach.For the active approach,it is suggested to exploit the functional characteristics of the product and the products in the same series or categories,for which a direct acquisition method and an evaluation data mining method are proposed,and a treadmill design case is studied.For the passive approach,it is suggested to exploit the scenario elements of product usage,for which a scenario elements questionnaire method and a scenario adaptation problem method are proposed,and a spinning bike design case is studied.The two design cases have demonstrated the process of customer needs identification and also verified the applicability of the proposed methods.展开更多
基金The National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.71671035)the Project of 2018 Intelligent Manufacturing Comprehensive Standard of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of Chinathe Open Fund of Jiangsu Wind Power Engineering Technology Center of China(No.ZK19-03-03)。
文摘To increase customers'satisfaction and promote product's competitiveness,a customized extended warranty(EW)policy is proposed,where the diversities in both the usage rate and purchase date are considered.The marginal approach is applied to describe the product's two-dimensional failure in terms of age and usage,respectively.Moreover,minimal repair is adopted to restore the failure,and the virtual age method is applied to depict the effect of preventive maintenance(PM).On this basis,an optimization model is established to minimize the maintenance cost and warranty cost from the manufacturer's view,and multiple factors are taken into account,including the PM's intensity and its period,and EW's interval,etc.A numerical case study is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.The results show that by considering the product's usage rate and the purchasing date of EW,the number of failures as well as the cost of maintenance and warranty can be reduced effectively.
文摘The multistage queue model was developed for a situation where parallel and unrelated queues exist at the first stage only. These queues merged into single queues at the remaining stages. The parallel queues offer services that are different from one another and customers arrive to join the queue that offer services that they need. The mathematical model was developed assuming an M/M/1 queue system and the measures of effectiveness were derived. The model was applied to solve the problem of customer congestion in a restaurant in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria that serves three different local delicacies. The three local delicacies constitute three different queues at the first stage. The second stage consists of only one queue which is for purchase of drinks and the third stage which is the last stage is for payment. Every customer in the restaurant passes through the three stages. Utilization factors for the five queues were determined and found to range from 70% to 97%. The average time spent by customers in the system was found to be 543.04 minutes. A simulation study using what-if scenario analysis was performed to determine the optimum service configuration for the system. The optimum configuration reduced average time for customers in the system from 543.04 minutes to 13.47 minutes without hiring new servers.
文摘The identification of customer needs is one of the important first⁃step works for product design.Contrary to explicit ones,the implicit customer needs are less obvious,thus relying on the designers to discover.Up till now,there still lacks a rational or systematic method on the identification of implicit customer needs.Designers have to rely on their own intuition and personal experience to do the work,hindering the product design and development further on.Therefore,it is necessary to study the implicit customer needs and their identification methods.To this end,this paper first studies the characteristics of implicit needs,and clarifies the relationship between implicit needs and explicit needs.Based on this,the concept of customer needs life cycle is put forward.After that,two methods for the identification of implicit needs are proposed,including an active approach and a passive approach.For the active approach,it is suggested to exploit the functional characteristics of the product and the products in the same series or categories,for which a direct acquisition method and an evaluation data mining method are proposed,and a treadmill design case is studied.For the passive approach,it is suggested to exploit the scenario elements of product usage,for which a scenario elements questionnaire method and a scenario adaptation problem method are proposed,and a spinning bike design case is studied.The two design cases have demonstrated the process of customer needs identification and also verified the applicability of the proposed methods.
