An intelligent forward quality enhancement system to achieve product customization

Purpose - This paper proposes an infrastructural framework, involving various emerging technologies, for the development of an agent-based quality enhancement system with the distinct feature of the ability to cope with the potential quality problems from various customers' requirements. Design/methodology/approach - The proposed system is equipped with the "distributed problem solving" feature which automatically identifies and divides the potential quality problems into sub-problems and directs straight to the associated agents that are capable of interacting and negotiating with each other to support customer needs. The new feature of this agile quality enhancement system is characterized with the incorporation of the quality mining engine through the capabilities of the online analytical processing, case-based reasoning, fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks, achieving the optimization of the performance of organizations. Findings - In this paper, the detailed architecture and the components included in the proposed system are described with a case study to validate its feasibility of application in actual environment. Originality/value - The proposed system is to enhance customer satisfaction by automating problem solving procedures in all business processes.