Mining Of Text In The Product Development Process

keen and firms need to have an edge over their competitors for profitability and sometimes, even for the survival of the business itself. One way to help achieve this is the capability for rapid product development on a continual basis. However, this rapidity must be accomplished without compromising vital information and feedback that are necessary. The compromise in such information and feedback at the expense of speed may result in counter-productive outcomes, thereby offsetting or even negating whatever profits that could have been derived. New ways, tools and techniques must be found to deliver such information. The widespread availability of databases within the Product Development Process (PDP) facilitates the use of data mining as one of the tools. Thus far, most of the studies on data mining within PDP have emphasised on numerical databases. Studies focusing on textual databases in this context have been relatively few. The research direction is to study real-life cases where textual databases can be mined to obtain valuable information for PDP. One suitable candidate identified for this is " voice of the customer " databases. good product development process is a key to creating a successful product. A well-organized and coherent development process serves to ensure the efficient delivery of a final product that suits customer's wants. Such products are truly the lifeblood of a company's long term economic existence. Thus it is no surprise that companies are willing to invest both time and effort to ensure a proper product development process so as to deliver competitive products. A Product Development Process is the sequence of steps or activities which an enterprise employs to conceive, design and commercialize a product (Ulrich and Eppinger, 2000). Although every organization may follow a slightly different process, the basic elements are usually the same. In essence, the major steps that would usually be incorporated into the PDP are: • Planning • Design • Production • Service and Support At each step different milestones have to be met. It is almost inevitable that several problems would be faced before these milestones could be reached or sometimes modified (due to the inability to achieve them). A wide variety of tools are currently used in industry to address some of these problems. Syan (1994) presented such a list of tools in his paper for a seven-phase PDP. These are shown in Table 1, with some slight modifications. These tools have been found …

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