Concurrent Engineering

QM ZG663 / DE ZG663

BITS Pilani L3.2: Product Development Scope

Pilani Campus
Contents

• Introduction
• Technology ‘S’ curve and Product Development
• Mission Statement
• Design Drivers

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Introduction

• What to develop?
• Should a new technology be introduced?
• Should the current product be refined and
tweaked to better please the customer?
• Should the product be expanded into
variant forms to more comprehensively
cover the market?

• Outsourcing vs. in-house development

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Some thoughts
• In business (and in life?) winning once is not enough.
• score repeated victories in the market, one after the other.
• you become a has-been, just another business that
sparkled brightly before flaming out.
• many once-successful companies that got to the top but
couldn’t stay there.
• Yet, some organizations do thrive at the top for decades
and even longer. They launch one successful business
after another, and routinely outperform their rivals through
both good times and bad.

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What’s their secret?

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Technology Forecasting

• Incremental
• Disruptive

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Technology Development
Simplified Technology  Transferring Technology 
Development Cycle Development Cycle

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Technology ‘s’ curves

• Technological innovation time cycle and market

behavior is well characterized by ‘S’ curve
• Technological innovation typically manifest
themselves into a market along ‘S’ curve
• In case of product , the Product Metric (In case of
bulb, lumens of light output per unit watt;
efficiency) can be plotted as function of time when
each product was introduced
• Metric value will naturally fall as an ‘S- curve’ in
time

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Product evolution - technology ‘s’ curve

Fluorescent

Incandescent

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Telecom Industry

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Perspective

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Stages of Technology ‘S’ Curve

• Lower portion
– Changes are less and widely spaced
– Not much innovation (slope)
• Middle portion
– rapid profusion of innovation (slope)
– many products are launched
– many competitors joins the market
• Top portion
– stagnation & maturity of existing product technology
– Physical laws of the process dominates and performance can not
improve further
– Few mature competitors

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Perspective

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Violation of ‘S’ Curve

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