Purpose: The purpose was to develop an approach to predict product quality considering current customers' expectations. Design/methodology/approach: The approach includes integrated techniques, i.e.: SMART(-ER) method, a questionnaire with the Likert scale, brainstorming (B&M), WSM method, and Naïve Bayes Classifier. This approach refers to obtaining customers' expectations for satisfaction from the current quality of products and the importance of these criteria. Based on the satisfaction of customers, the quality of the product was estimated and classified. Then, the quality of the product was predicted for current customers. Findings: It was shown that it is possible to predict product quality based on current customer expectations, and so based on the current existing product. Research limitations/implications: The proposed approach does not include the possibilities of determining the expected quality of the product. The approach focuses on predicting customers' satisfaction with the current quality of the product. Therefore, if there is a need for improvement actions, further analyzes should be carried out to determine which criteria should be modified and how. Practical implications: The presented approach can be used for any product. Therefore, it is a useful tool for any kind of organization, which strives to meet customer satisfaction. Despite the possibility to predict the quality of the product, the proposed approach can indicate at an early stage to the organization that it is necessary to make improvement actions. Social implications: It is possible to reduce the waste of resources by predicting that improvement actions are necessary. Moreover, the approach supports an entity (e.g., expert, enterprise, interested parties) in predicting current customers' satisfaction. Originality/value: Originality is predicting product quality based on current customers' expectations. A new combination of quality management techniques, decision support, and machine learning was implemented.
The purpose of this paper was testing suitability of the time-series analysis for quality control of the continuous steel casting process in production conditions. The analysis was carried out on industrial data collected in one of Polish steel plants. The production data concerned defective fractions of billets obtained in the process. The procedure of the industrial data preparation is presented. The computations for the time-series analysis were carried out in two ways, both using the authors’ own software. The first one, applied to the real numbers type of the data has a wide range of capabilities, including not only prediction of the future values but also detection of important periodicity in data. In the second approach the data were assumed in a binary (categorical) form, i.e. the every heat(melt) was labeled as ‘Good’ or ‘Defective’. The naïve Bayesian classifier was used for predicting the successive values. The most interesting results of the analysis include good prediction accuracies obtained by both methodologies, the crucial influence of the last preceding point on the predicted result for the real data time-series analysis as well as obtaining an information about the type of misclassification for binary data. The possibility of prediction of the future values can be used by engineering or operational staff with an expert knowledge to decrease fraction of defective products by taking appropriate action when the forthcoming period is identified as critical.
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