Insights on next-generation manufacturing of smart devices using text analytics

With the mass expansion in technological user-friendly products, there is an increasing demand for smart devices, resulting in a highly competitive novel market. To ensure sustainable success, these products must remain robust and be perceived positively by customers. With the development of Web 2.0, individuals are able to make knowledgeable purchasing decisions, specifically with the availability of millions of online customer reviews. Companies manufacturing smart devices can utilize this unstructured data to analyze the customers' perceptions of their products and identify potential improvements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose next-generation manufacturing insights for companies producing smart devices by determining the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of these gadgets using text analytics. A three stage methodology is utilized, consisting of bigram and trigram examination, topic identification, and SWOT analysis. After online review extraction, comments for each smart device are separated into positive, neutral, and negative categories, based on the customer ratings. Text analytic tools are then used to determine the most frequently occurring bigrams and trigrams to provide topics for conducting the SWOT analysis. Using the SWOT technique results, numerous next-generation smart device manufacturing recommendations are presented.