Structuring Perceived Quality Attributes For Use In The Design Process

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Perceived quality has received much attention the last decade, mainly in the automotive industry. The focal drivers are the competitiveness within the premium segment, and customers’ high demands. The existing definitions of perceived quality found in the literature are fuzzy. Methods for assessing perceived quality do exist, however the attributes need to be incorporated into existing design support systems to be efficiently used in the design process. This paper is a first attempt to merge a new terminology framework of perceived quality with an apparent problem, observed at an automotive company, of incorporating perceived quality in the product design process. A case study was conducted at an automotive company to depict the current state of managing information. It was uncovered that information is scattered across systems and that the way to package information is assorted. A new framework, introducing Value Based Perceived Quality and Technical Perceived Quality is presented. To better incorporate the attributes into the design process, a platform system model is proposed. In this way, perceived quality attributes can be reused for various design applications.