Abstract
Customer Value Chain Analysis (CVCA) is an original methodological tool that enables design teams in the product definition phase to comprehensively identify pertinent stakeholders, their relationships with each other, and their role in the product’s life cycle. By performing CVCA, design teams are better able to recognize diverse product requirements and their relative priority when undertaking Product Definition Assessment and using downstream ‘Design for X’ (DfX) tools. This paper discusses the evolution of the CVCA in response to the need for a DfX tool which is able to delineate customer needs early in the product development process. A step-by-step guide clarifies the implementation of CVCA with an example. Three case studies highlight the tool’s broad utility and important features to support design decision making, including: (1) confirmation of the product’s business model, (2) recognition of the critical stakeholders, and (3) clarification of the value proposition to be embedded in the product.
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Notes
Urban and Hauser (1993) characterize the voice of the customer as “A list of customer needs, a hierarchical structure for those needs, a set of importances to prioritize those needs, and evaluations of competitors on those needs.” They add that “the voice of the customer must be heard accurately and interpreted accurately if high quality products are to be designed and marketed successfully.”
See http://www.me217.stanford.edu for the Product Definition Assessment Checklist
Affinity Diagrams, also called the KJ Method, are a graphical means to distinguish themes from a list of customer needs. See Jiro (1975).
End users often differ from end customers; the end user is the target user of the designed product, whereas the end customer is the ‘end’ stakeholder of a branch. In this case study, the end user is the Kenyan farmer who uses the micro-irrigation pump. The end customers are the citizens of the donor country and the farmer.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge Edith Wilson, the students and partner companies of the ME217/317 Design for Manufacturability (dfM) course at Stanford University and the staff of KickStart for their invaluable contributions to the development of the CVCA. This research was in part funded by the United States Department of Energy Manufacturing and Processing Fellowship.
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Donaldson, K.M., Ishii, K. & Sheppard, S.D. Customer Value Chain Analysis. Res Eng Design 16, 174–183 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-006-0012-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-006-0012-8