Evaluating customer requirements in Eco-VA

Products must be environmentally friendly as well as conform with the market in order to go for a sustainable society. A tool named Eco-Value Analysis (Eco-VA) has been developed by modifying the traditional Value Analysis (VA). Eco-VA allows product developers to analyze functions of a product from economic costs, customers? importance, and environmental impacts. However, Eco-VA has the following possible improvements due to the characteristics of VA. First, it is sometimes difficult to obtain correct and accurate requirements of end users. There can be a way for end users to do it in more ?user-oriented? way. Second, Eco-VA does not support product developers with finding the product concept to be investigated. In order to improve in these points, this paper presents a new method. First, the modelling method of Service Engineering (SE) is adopted. A function to represent value is replaced with a Receiver?s State Parameter (RSP), which designers represent the benefits or costs in SE. Second, Conjoint Analysis and AHP are applied to end users? evaluation. Conjoint Analysis is carried out using design solution candidates represented with a limited small number of attributes and their levels. The presented method is verified by its application to a food processing machine.