The product development process of an enterprise from an SSME perspective

This study empirically explores a real-world manufacturer product development process from a service science perspective. In this era of keen global competition, the process of product development is crucial for companies before the final product is launched to the market. The poor development of a product can fail to meet customer needs and result in product failure, which can even lead to significant losses for manufacturers. However, traditional product development processes are much more manufacture-oriented rather than customer-involved. In this paper, we aim to use the Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) perspective, proposed by IBM, to improve product demand asymmetries by discovering true user requirements in order to enhance customer involvement and lead to better product development. We show how SSME is applied in the context of product development and in the discovery of customer needs, and propose a modified process based on SSME to the product development process.