CUSTOMER PRODUCTIVITY: A MEASURE FOR PRODUCT AND PROCESS DEVELOPMENT WITH CUSTOMERS

Although workforce productivity is widely used today, production is quickly moving toward product and process development with customers. Creative customers would like to get more and more involved in product development and furthermore, they would like to get satisfaction not only from the final product but from the processes as well. So we have to introduce a new measure for productivity, which focuses more on how much satisfaction a customer obtains from production. So the new definition of productivity in this sense will be Customer productivity = Amount of satisfaction/ Customer's psychological time and money (physical and virtual involvement in production) This is different from the,current customer satisfaction. Current one is focused on how much satisfaction a customer will have for a final product. This is a definition from the standpoint of the producer. The new definition is from the standpoint of the customer. This paper points out that if we introduce Mahalanobis Taguchi System, such a measure can be established and we can introduce a new metric for measuring customer's satisfaction for the new type of prosumer system or co-production.