Customer Satisfaction through Product Lifecycle Management Process

Abstract

Business life has become more customer-orientated, and competition is harder in global markets. This means that products must get faster to the market, and collection of customer and market information must be effective all the time. This also means effective business case follow-up to every product through their lifecycle. Due to the global competition, organization must find new ways to add customer value by standing out from competitors and make operational processes more performance. By creating and adding customer value the organization also adds value to employees, shareholders and other stakeholders. This all means a well-known product lifecycle and its management. When organization recognizes the product lifecycle processes, nodes of the functions and process phases, internal and external partners and customers, and gets a total picture of the product lifecycle, it has a better possibility to add customer satisfaction and help to notice new factors for adding the competitive advantage. The thesis aims to improve the case organization product lifecycle management, define what kind of actions it needs for success of customer satisfaction, how to measure the phases to improve it continuously, define what kind of management the process needs and it also give suggest further proposals. This work has been commissioned by high technology organization and that is why some parts are confidential in the work.

The thesis method is action research and the subject is approached by qualitative ways. The main strategy is product lifecycle management from the viewpoint of customer satisfaction. First, the thesis opens meanings of different existing theories and models from product lifecycle, process management and customer satisfaction. Secondly it opens the thesis process and describes the case organization’s present situation by a qualitative way. Thirdly, it creates an empirical and a theoretical frame for the thesis. Finally, the thesis looks deeper at the new created Product Lifecycle Management Process (PLMP) model, created customer satisfaction model, the management and the marginal terms through PLMP by a qualitative way.

The results of the thesis are a main level description from the organization new product lifecycle management process, customer satisfaction through the process, the marginal terms, management through PLMP and the synthesis between all earlier mentioned factors. This model gives a basic structure for managing a total product lifecycle and that is why it also opens management of process. The thesis does not try to generalize the results, but it creates a possibility to look at PLM from different point of views and expand it.