A Pro-Environmental Method of Sample Size Determination to Predict the Quality Level of Products Considering Current Customers’ Expectations

Abstract

The main factor that conditions the success of organizations is the development of products oriented toward customer satisfaction. An additional attribute of organizations is the use of sustainable development rules. The use of these rules and the simultaneous desire to create high-quality products encourage organizations to apply different methods to, for example, eliminate waste. This study aimed to develop a method to determine the research sample size required to predict a product’s quality level, taking into account current customers’ expectations. This method was developed by modifying a procedure to determine the research sample size as part of the calculated estimator of the mean value in the general population. Based on the concept of product sustainability development, the goal of the developed method was to determine the number of potential customers (respondents) needed to provide product requirements, which were then processed and used to predict the quality level of the product. This method was applied to simultaneously test a number of hypotheses, determine the test power, and detect statistically significant differences for several relationships of the sample sizes and the test power. This was achieved using universal hypotheses and the popular alternative-punctual (MAP) method. Testing of the proposed method showed that it was able to predict the quality level of products based on current expectations of customers.

Model of Choice Photovoltaic Panels Considering Customers’ Expectations

“…Meeting customer expectations is the basic activity of successful organizations [68][69][70]. In the era of increased demand for the implementation of renewable energy sources (RES) [2,4,10], it is effective to install and develop photovoltaic panels.…”

Model to Predict Quality of Photovoltaic Panels Considering Customers’ Expectations

“…The weights are calculated using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method [37][38][39]. Then, photovoltaic panels are assessed using the Likert scale [40,41]. It is an initial assessment of the satisfaction of customer expectations from photovoltaic panels.…”

“…Additionally, the customer should be able to point out his own criteria. According to the literature review, for example [1,3,12,14,40,50], the customer is able to simultaneously assess simultaneously from 5 to 9 criteria. Therefore, the summary number of all criteria (proposed and individually determined by the customer) should be equal to 7 ± 2 [9,14,50].…”

“…It results from the possibilities of adjusting groups of aesthetic criteria to the initial determined customer expectations in the case of BIPV or BAPV panels (from stage 2). According to the literature [1,3,12,14,40,50], the number of criteria should be equal to 5 to 9 criteria. Also, it results from the concept of model, where the aesthetic criteria will be a comparison in pairs.…”

“…Relative states scale [1,4,40]-a scale that supports (and predicts) satisfaction with making a decision; effective in determining customer satisfaction in terms of product quality.…”