1,621
Views
30
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Customer demand prediction of service-oriented manufacturing incorporating customer satisfaction

, &
Pages 1303-1321 | Received 28 Sep 2014, Accepted 21 Jun 2015, Published online: 20 Jul 2015
 

Abstract

With the emergence of individualised and personalised customer demands, the interaction of service and product has come into the sight of manufacturers and thus promoted the arising of service-oriented manufacturing (SOM), a new business mode that combines manufacturing and service. Be similar to the conventional manufacturing, the customer demand prediction (CDP) of SOM is very important since it is the foundation of the following manufacturing stages. As there are always tight and frequent interactions between service providers and customers in SOM, the customer satisfaction would significantly influence the customer demand of the following purchasing periods. To cope with this issue, a novel CDP approach for SOM incorporating customer satisfaction is proposed. Firstly, the structural relationships among customer satisfaction index and the influence factors are quantitatively modelled by using the structural equation model. Secondly, to reduce the adverse effect of multiple structural input data and small sample size, the least square support vector mechanism is employed to predict customer demand. Finally, the CDP of the air conditioner compressor which is a typical SOM product is implemented as the real-case example, and the effectiveness and validity of the proposed approach is elaborated from the prediction results analysis and comparison.

Acknowledgement

The authors express sincere appreciation to the designers and engineers for their support in collecting the customer requirements data and establishing the quality function deployment, and also express sincere appreciation to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments to improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation, China [grant number 70932004].

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.