Customer-driven manufacturing is the key concept for the factory of the future. The markets for consumer goods are nowadays marked by an increase in variety, while at the same time showing steadily decreasing product life-cycles. In addition, tailoring the product to the customer's needs is becoming increasingly important in quality improvement. These trends are resulting in production in small batches, driven by customer orders. Customer-driven Manufacturing adopts a design-oriented approach, splitting the realisation of customer-driven manufacturing into three main steps. Firstly, you must understand the primary process of your business. The second step is to analyse and re-design the management and control of the organisation. Finally, the organisation's information system must be analysed and redesigned.

Wouldn't it be great if you could design a product with the customer in mind - right from the very start? Well, now there's a way: Quality Function Development, or QFD, translates the needs of the consumer directly into the design and development of new products and services. By focusing on customer needs and incorporating them into every phase of the manufacturing process, it eliminates waste and improves customer satisfaction. And that means increased sales, greater profits, and a bigger share of the market.Step-by-Step QFD is a practical, hands-on guide to implementing QFD at any organization. Written by an expert in the field, it shoes how the intensive study of consumer needs can be used to help you dramatically outperform the competition. In fact, the strategies outlined in this book have already met with great success at a number of corporations both within and outside of the United States. This workbook includes a case study of QFD in action, 34 helpful workshops, and an analysis of the synergy between QFD, TRIZ, and Taguchi. So whether you're a QFD trainer, project manager, design engineer, or manufacturer, Step-by-Step QFD will show you how to let one voice drive your entire design process - the customer's!

Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land's End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.

Does your organization provide customer satisfaction or does it inspire customer loyalty? Which is more important? See how lessons learned from the service sector were applied to manufacturing and other diverse settings, including the nonprofit sector and even on one‘s own home front.Exploring the Kano Model, The Customer-Driven Organization: Emplo

Businesses worry about new technologies, but customers are the ultimate disruptors—Suman Sarkar offers bold strategies for making sure you understand your customers and keep up with their ever-changing needs. Disruption—the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts—drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware. Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs. He argues that businesses need to focus on existing customers first—research shows they're likely to spend more and are more profitable than new customers. Personalization is becoming important for the newer generations in both developed and developing markets, so Sarkar describes approaches to make them cost-effective. In our era of instant gratification, customers want what they want now—Sarkar explains how you can develop and deliver products and services faster than ever. And since a few bad Yelp reviews, social media posts, or angry tweets from customers can ruin you, Sarkar shows how to proactively make sure the quality of your products and services stays better than that of your competitors. The key to survival in this era of changing customer needs is to focus on and address them quickly so customers don't switch to the competition. Drawing on his experiences with leading companies worldwide, Sarkar offers five strategies and techniques that will keep you ahead of the curve.

Supply Chain Strategies: Customer Driven and Customer Focused highlights the main challenges facing organizations wanting to select, design and implement successful supply chain strategies in an increasingly global and competitive environment. The text features discussion questions at the end of each chapter to promote learning, and numerous industry examples to ilustrate key concepts within chapters. Each chapter discusses the issues in relation to previous literature, contemporary practices and the lesson to be learned from different industries where successful management of supply chains has improved organizational and industry level profitability. The text includes a number of industry examples, thereby giving a wide-ranging approach to the topic.

A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations "Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation." -Clayton Christensen For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm--that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually. In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated. Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives. With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to: Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possible Recognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors do Identify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer value Systematically define breakthrough products and services concepts Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.

Digital Twin Driven Smart Manufacturing examines the background, latest research, and application models for digital twin technology, and shows how it can be central to a smart manufacturing process.The interest in digital twin in manufacturing is driven by a need for excellent product reliability, and an overall trend towards intelligent, and connected manufacturing systems. This book provides an ideal entry point to this subject for readers in industry and academia, as it answers the questions: (a) What is a digital twin? (b) How to construct a digital twin? (c) How to use a digital twin to improve manufacturing efficiency? (d) What are the essential activities in the implementation of a digital twin? (e) What are the most important obstacles to overcome for the successful deployment of a digital twin? (f) What are the relations between digital twin and New Technologies? (g) How to combine digital twin with the New Technologies to achieve high efficiency and smartness in manufacturing?This book focuses on these problems as it aims to help readers make the best use of digital twin technology towards smart manufacturing. - Analyzes the differences, synergies and possibilities for integration between digital twin technology and other technologies, such as big data, service and Internet of Things - Discuss new requirements for a traditional three-dimension digital twin and proposes a methodology for a five-dimension version - Investigates new models for optimized manufacturing, prognostics and health management, and cyber-physical fusion based on the digital twin

Get the expert perspective and practical advice on big data The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits makes the case that big data is for real, and more than just big hype. The book uses real-life examples—from Nate Silver to Copernicus, and Apple to Blackberry—to demonstrate how the winners of the future will use big data to seek the truth. Written by a marketing journalist and the CEO of a multi-million-dollar B2B marketing platform that reaches more than 90% of the U.S. business population, this book is a comprehensive and accessible guide on how to win customers, beat competitors, and boost the bottom line with big data. The marketplace has entered an era where the customer holds all the cards. With unprecedented choice in both the consumer world and the B2B world, it's imperative that businesses gain a greater understanding of their customers and prospects. Big data is the key to this insight, because it provides a comprehensive view of a company's customers—who they are, and who they may be tomorrow. The Big Data-Driven Business is a complete guide to the future of business as seen through the lens of big data, with expert advice on real-world applications. Learn what big data is, and how it will transform the enterprise Explore why major corporations are betting their companies on marketing technology Read case studies of big data winners and losers Discover how to change privacy and security, and remodel marketing Better information allows for better decisions, better targeting, and better reach. Big data has become an indispensable tool for the most effective marketers in the business, and it's becoming less of a competitive advantage and more like an industry standard. Remaining relevant as the marketplace evolves requires a full understanding and application of big data, and The Big Data-Driven Business provides the practical guidance businesses need.

The global economy is witnessing previously unseen levels of competitiveness, forcing business leaders to contend with unprecedented challenges. No longer can companies seize and hold a customer base by operating adequately. In order to enjoy a competitive advantage, an organization must operate at exemplary levels of performance in every facet of business and maintain that degree of excellence indefinitely. This is achieved through careful alignment of operational systems and the use of innovative process management initiatives. “Unless an organization is uniquely qualified to deal with its customers by understanding its own strengths and weakness,” writes internationally renowned operational management expert Christopher K. Ahoy, “it will be unable to understand what is required to move from the current paradigm of doing business.” In Customer-Driven Operations Management, Ahoy distills the most current business theories and practices that will help you weed out and eliminate operational inefficiencies and put in place the necessary metrics for providing products and services better, cheaper, and faster than ever. Ahoy walks you through the steps of creating a world-class organization, which include Mapping your company's processes to target weak points Realigning management systems from functional to process-focused Setting benchmarks throughout the process to help quantify levels of success Establish a system of knowledge management for the seamless alignment of teams and departments Improving process management using Lean, Six Sigma, and other methodologies Create a sound strategic planning initiative to eliminate future surprises With diagrams and figures to highlight salient points, Customer-Driven Operations Management clarifies and simplifies the otherwise daunting task of enacting major changes in your company's operations systems.