Commonly Used External TAM Variables in e-Learning, Agriculture and Virtual Reality Applications

In recent years information and communication technologies (ICT) have played a significant role in all aspects of modern society and have impacted socioeconomic development in sectors such as education, administration, business, medical care and agriculture. The benefits of such technologies in agriculture can be appreciated only if farmers use them. In order to predict and evaluate the adoption of these new technological tools, the technology acceptance model (TAM) can be a valid aid. This paper identifies the most commonly used external variables in e-learning, agriculture and virtual reality applications for further validation in an e-learning tool designed for EU farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs. Starting from a literature review of the technology acceptance model, the analysis based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) shows that computer self-efficacy, individual innovativeness, computer anxiety, perceived enjoyment, social norm, content and system quality, experience and facilitating conditions are the most common determinants addressing technology acceptance. Furthermore, findings evidenced that the external variables have a different impact on the two main beliefs of the TAM Model, Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU). This study is expected to bring theoretical support for academics when determining the variables to be included in TAM extensions

Some further studies on improving QFD methodology and analysis

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) starts and ends with the customer. In other words, how it ends may depend largely on how it starts. Any QFD practitioners will start with collecting the voice of the customer that reflects customer’s needs as to make sure that the products will eventually sell or the service may satisfy the customer. On the basis of those needs, a product or service creation process is initiated. It always takes a certain period of time for the product or service to be ready for the customer. The question here is whether those customer-needs may remain exactly the same during the product or service creation process. The answer would be very likely to be a ‘no’, especially in today’s rapidly changing environment due to increased competition and globalization. The focus of this thesis is placed on dealing with the change of relative importance of the customer’s needs during product or service creation process. In other words, the assumption is that there is no new need discovered along the time or an old one becomes outdated; only the relative importance change of the existing needs is dealt with. Considering the latest development of QFD research, especially the increasingly extensive use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in QFD, this thesis aims to enhance the current QFD methodology and analysis, with respect to the change during product or service creation process, as to continually meet or exceed the needs of the customer. The entire research works are divided into three main parts, namely, the further use of AHP in QFD, the incorporation of AHP-based priorities’ dynamics in QFD, and decision making analysis with respect to the dynamics. The first part focuses on the question "In what ways does AHP, considering its strength and weakness, contribute to an improved QFD analysis?" The usefulness of AHP in QFD is demonstrated through a case study in improving higher education quality of an education institution. Furthermore, a generalized model of using AHP in QFD is also proposed. The generalized model not only provides an alternative way to construct the house of quality (HoQ), but also creates the possibility to include other relevant factors into QFD analysis, such as new product development risks. The second part addresses the question "How to use the AHP in QFD in dealing with the dynamics of priorities?" A novel quantitative method to model the dynamics of AHP-based priorities in the HoQ is proposed. The method is simple and time-efficient. It is especially useful when the historical data is limited, which is the case in a highly dynamic environment. As to further improve QFD analysis, the modeling method is applied into two areas. The first area is to enhance the use of Kano’s model in QFD by considering its dynamics. It not only extends the use of Kano’s model in QFD, but also advances the academic literature on modeling the life cycle of quality attributes quantitatively. The second area is to enhance the benchmarking part of QFD by including the dynamics of competitors’ performance in addition to the dynamics of customer’s needs. The third part deals with the question "How to make decision in a QFD analysis with respect to the dynamics in the house of quality?" Two decision making approaches are proposed to prioritize and/or optimize the technical attributes with respect to the modeling results. Considering the fact that almost all QFD translation process employs the relationship matrix, a guideline for QFD practitioners to decide whether the relationship matrix should be normalized is developed. Furthermore, a practical implication of the research work towards the possible use of QFD in helping a company develop more innovative products is also discussed. In brief, the main contribution of this thesis is in providing some novel methods and/or approaches to enhance the QFD’s use with respect to the change during product or service creation process. For scientific community, this means that the existing QFD research has been considerably improved, especially with the use of AHP in QFD. For engineering practice, a better way of doing QFD analysis, as a customer-driven engineering design tool, has been proposed. It is hoped that the research work may provide a first step into a better customer-driven product or service design process, and eventually increase the possibility to create more innovative and competitive products or services over time

Product Design

Product design is a comprehensive process related to the creation of new products, and the ability to design and develop efficient products are key to success in today’s dynamic global market. Written by experts in the field, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the product design process and its applications in various fields, particularly engineering. Over seven chapters, the authors explore such topics as development of new product design methodologies, implementation of effective methods for integrated products, development of more visualized environments for task-based conceptual design methods, and development of engineering design tools based on 3D photogrammetry, among others

A Customer Value Assessment Process (CVAP) for Ballistic Missile Defense

A systematic customer value assessment process (CVAP) was developed to give system engineering teams the capability to qualitatively and quantitatively assess customer values. It also provides processes and techniques used to create and identify alternatives, evaluate alternatives in terms of effectiveness, cost, and risk. The ultimate goal is to provide customers (or decision makers) with objective and traceable procurement recommendations. The creation of CVAP was driven by an industry need to provide ballistic missile defense (BMD) customers with a value proposition of contractors’ BMD systems. The information that outputs from CVAP can be used to guide BMD contractors in formulating a value proposition, which is used to steer customers to procure their BMD system(s) instead of competing system(s). The outputs from CVAP also illuminate areas where systems can be improved to stay relevant with customer values by identifying capability gaps. CVAP incorporates proven approaches and techniques appropriate for military applications. However, CVAP is adaptable and may be applied to business, engineering, and even personal every-day decision problems and opportunities. CVAP is based on the systems decision process (SDP) developed by Gregory S. Parnell and other systems engineering faculty at the Unites States Military Academy (USMA). SDP combines Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) decision analysis philosophy with Multi-Objective Decision Analysis (MODA) quantitative analysis of alternatives. CVAP improves SDP’s qualitative value model by implementing Quality Function Deployment (QFD), solution design implements creative problem solving techniques, and the qualitative value model by adding cost analysis and risk assessment processes practiced by the U.S DoD and industry. CVAP and SDP fundamentally differ from other decision making approaches, like the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), by distinctly separating the value/utility function assessment process with the ranking of alternatives. This explicit value assessment allows for straightforward traceability of the specific factors that influence decisions, which illuminates the tradeoffs involved in making decisions with multiple objectives. CVAP is intended to be a decision support tool with the ultimate purpose of helping decision makers attain the best solution and understanding the differences between the alternatives. CVAP does not include any processes for implementation of the alternative that the customer selects. CVAP is applied to ballistic missile defense (BMD) to give contractors ideas on how to use it. An introduction of BMD, unique BMD challenges, and how CVAP can improve the BMD decision making process is presented. Each phase of CVAP is applied to the BMD decision environment. CVAP is applied to a fictitious BMD example

Optimizing Sustainable Product Development

Global warming, which is caused by increasing concentrations of carbon emissions, mainly results from human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation. In order to alleviate global warming and its adverse effects, many countries including the United States and the European Union members have attempted to enact legislation or design market-based carbon trading mechanisms to control carbon emissions. Analyzing the impact of such governmental legislation on developing products has been studied, both in theory and practice. Firms need to incorporate governmental regulations and consider environmental issues and reduced carbon emission in their product development processes, this thesis presents three models for sustainable product development. All models consider environmental issues and cost for the whole life cycle of the product, from the extraction of raw materials to the end of life of the product. Three group of customer requirements are defined as cost, quality and sustainability. The objective of the models is to maximize utility to the customers for these groups of customer requirements. In all three models, three groups of customer requirements are translated to design specifications and the utility of each group is evaluated. The first model is a scoring model to compare between different designs and select the best one; the second model is an optimization model, which provides optimum value for design specifications while maximizing the total utility to the customers for the final design. And finally, the third model is a two-stage stochastic optimization model in which the weights of customer requirements are considered as uncertain parameters. This model also provides the optimum value for design specifications while modeling the weight of customer requirements as an uncertain parameter. The last two models are non-linear, non-convex models with certain conditions and are solved using the Branch-and-Reduce Optimization Navigator methodology. In all three models, Quality Function Deployment is applied to make trade-offs within each group of customer requirements and multi-attribute utility theory is used to make trade-offs between three groups of customer requirements. All three models are applied to a case study, and results show that introducing uncertainty in the parameters increases the total utility by 9.41%, and the optimization model also has the potential to help designers find an optimum design yielding higher customer satisfaction, reducing the time of product development process and making the final design more reliable based on stakeholder’s opinions

Impact estimation: IT priority decisions

Given resource constraints, prioritization is a fundamental process within systems engineering to decide what to implement. However, there is little guidance about this process and existing IT prioritization methods have several problems, including failing to adequately cater for stakeholder value. In response to these issues, this research proposes an extension to an existing prioritization method, Impact Estimation (IE) to create Value Impact Estimation (VIE). VIE extends IE to cater for multiple stakeholder viewpoints and to move towards better capture of explicit stakeholder value. The use of metrics offers VIE the means of expressing stakeholder value that relates directly to real world data and so is informative to stakeholders and decision makers. Having been derived from prioritization factors found in the literature, stakeholder value has been developed into a multi-dimensional, composite concept, associated with other fundamental system concepts: objectives, requirements, designs, increment plans, increment deliverables and system contexts. VIE supports the prioritization process by showing where the stakeholder value resides for the proposed system changes. The prioritization method was proven to work by exposing it to three live projects, which served as case studies to this research. The use of the extended prioritization method was seen as very beneficial. Based on the three case studies, it is possible to say that the method produces two major benefits: the calculation of the stakeholder value to cost ratios (a form of ROI) and the system understanding gained through creating the VIE table