Quality function deployment (QFD) is a planning tool used in new product development and quality management. It aims at achieving maximum customer satisfaction by listening to the voice of customers. To implement QFD, customer requirements (CRs) should be identified and assessed first. The current paper proposes a linear goal programming (LGP) approach to assess the relative importance weights ...

Mass customization and configure-toorder production are modern business strategies in which the goods and services offered by a company are tailored and individualized according to the specific needs and preferences of the customer. The classical examples of such configurable products include cars, personal computers, and various types of comparably complex technical devices; today, however, yo...

The business world is undergoing a revolution driven by the use of data and analytics to guide decision-making. While many forces are at work, a major reason for the business analytics revolution is the rapid proliferation of the amount of data available to be analysed. Recent days, big data is beginning to have a major impact on air travel with more data being created both through the plane se...

E-commerce customers may have a problem when paying for the purchase of a major item, if its price is larger than the available credit on their credit card. In the brick and mortar world, this problem would be solved by paying part of the bill with cash or with a second credit card. In e-commerce, however, this has not been an option. Furthermore, even when a customer could pay the whole purcha...

Current search engines can hardly cope adequately with complex preferences. The biggest problem of search engines directly implemented with standard SQL is that SQL does not directly understand the notion of preferences. Preference SQL extends standard SQL by a preference model based on strict partial orders, where preference queries behave like soft selection constraints. A variety of built-in...

We present an integrated design and marketing approach to facilitate the generation of an optimal robust set of product design alternatives to carry forward to the prototyping stage. The approach considers variability in both (i) engineering design domain, and (ii) customer preferences in marketing domain. In the design domain, the approach evaluates performance and robustness of a design alter...