Integrating Customers into Product Development : A Business Process Model with a View to Industrial Practice

Companies need practical customer integration processes to enable them to exploit their customers’ valuable knowledge as a key resource during product and service development. However, existing customer integration processes do not capture complex production environments with heterogeneous markets, such as at commercial vehicle manufacturers, like our research partners. Literature already acknowledges that holistic views are required across all development phases, yet many approaches focus only on targeted phases, leading to fragmented usage in companies. In addition, existing approaches do not anchor new processes in existing organizational structures, which has a negative impact on industrial applicability. Based on existing literature and empirical data, this study applies a mixed-methods approach to iteratively develop this missing industrially applicable process. As a result, an industrially applicable process for integrating highly heterogeneous customers is provided that covers the entire cross-functional development process, and yet is anchored in existing processes. The wide range of operational applications is based, for example, by clearly defining the goal of customer integration in each company at the beginning of the process, taking into account the respective development phase. This process flexibility allows adaptation to available resources and company-specific conditions with differing market requirements, thus making the findings relevant to practitioners