A rough set approach for evaluating vague customer requirement of industrial product-service system_Wenyan Songa

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Figure 1. Framework of the IPS 2 requirement elicitation and evaluation.
Therefore, to obtain industrial customer’s requirement systematically and effectively, a new tool named I-CAC analysis
is proposed in this section. An I-CAC consists of three kinds of activities, pre-what goes on before the industrial customer
obtains the expected result, during-what happens while they derives the core benefit and post-what happens after
long use of the product. Each category consists of several key activities. As is shown in the middle ring of Figure 2, in
the phase of pre-use, customers firstly conduct product selection and matching to choose the most appropriate products
to satisfy their production need. This activity would be significant to the overall function and operation efficiency. The
procurement includes activities such as bargaining, delivery, inspection and payment. After procurement, installation,
debugging and commissioning of the product is necessary to ensure the quick and reliable equipment starting and running.
In the phase of during use, operation of industrial product mainly focuses on the efficient use and collecting relevant
information of the product. To improving equipment operation efficiency and reduce equipment lifecycle costs,
MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) is adopted, which includes activities such as disassembly, diagnosis, spare part
supply, etc. In the final phase of post-use, upgrading and scrapping are related activities equipment dismantling, assessment,
refurbishment and recycling.
It is only when a product interacts with customer in an activity that designers can actually determine the benefit,
costs or even, the environmental effects. The I-CAC model could be tailored for the actual context of different types of
industrial products. A key concept here is the life time perspective, which takes a broader, holistic and longer term perspective,
which often reveals the business potential of the whole value chain.
4.1.2 Stakeholder identification and relationship mapping in the I-CAC model
In the first step, different stakeholders (direct or indirect) throughout the lifecycle are identified so that designers can
acquire common value from them later. A stakeholder could either be from the external or internal organisational
environment. There are various stakeholders around the I-CAC, each with different types of stakes in the decisions made
during the development of an IPS 2 . The stakeholders include end users/customers, spare part suppliers, laws and
regulations, procurement engineer, operator, and IPS 2 providers (see outer ring in Figure 2). Those stakeholders play