DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2016.1467
title: An introduction to the integrated decision-support system for generating the optimal engineering designs

description: Identifying customer needs is a compulsory step in product design and development. All products are developed under the criteria of maximum customer’s satisfaction. Recently, the factors influenced customer’s decision have been studied and researched. The customers select and try to find the products that might suit them. Fortunately, some can find the desire product with the acceptable price and quality; however, in different situation, some fulfil their needs by purchasing the same quality of the product with higher price. For basic needs, people decide to purchase a product quickly from the regular market based on their experiences without considering and emphasizing on social classes or higher-level needs. For basic needs combining the social needs, the customer’s decision for purchasing is influenced by fashion, advertisement, friends or culture.  For these reasons, some hidden issues are existed and cannot be revealed. Presented in this research is the alternative channel or guideline for assisting the design engineer or manufacturer to translate the customer’s requirements and behaviours on purchasing a basic need product and basic need combining social need. Foot inserts and pillows with different materials have been applied as the basic need product while eyeglasses with different shape and material have been applied as the basic need combining the social need product. The customer’s behaviours, and factors influenced on purchasing will be analyzed and discussed before creating the guideline. The objective of this paper is to propose how to set up design guideline in product design. It involves establishing target group, identifying customer needs, and performing competitive analysis.  For the foot inserts, the interviewed 150 ladies from the central provinces of Thailand prefer to wear flat shoes for performing daily activities. A 54% of the interviewed group of prefers to apply heel insoles for releasing stress occurred during the day; especially the ladies who are members of an aircrew or a flight attendant. The applications of Tek-scan and finite element have been applied to help to select the appropriate insoles with a reasonable price for minimizing foot pain or extending the walking period tolerance of  daily activities where the same or favorite shoes still be applied.For the pillows, teenagers are used as target group respectively. The principle of randomized complete block design was introduced in order to investigate customer aspect on market pillow. The results reveal that twenty-five percent of teenagers purchase a pillow by looking at price and pillow made from memory foam has the highest effect on customer perception in term of comfort rate and expected price. However, ball fiber should be used to made pillow from considering customer purchasing behaviour.For the eye glasses, Kansei Engineering (KE) with statistical analysis has been applied in this research for analysing the customer’s behaviours and the specific requirements which have the direct effect on the number of products that cannot be sold or are left in the stock. Three main activities are required for accomplishing the proposed approach: identifying, measuring, and analysing the specific characteristics of the product and customer’s requirement.