Product Design

DE ZG541
BITS Pilani Lecture - 4 Dr. Glynn John
Mechanical Engineering
Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

DE ZG541, Product Design

Lecture No. 4
  Product Planning (Cont.)

 Product Specification Development

What are specifications?
When are specifications established?
Establishing target specifications
Setting the final specifications

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The Product Planning Process

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 Step 1: Identify Opportunities
 The planning process begins with the identification of
product development opportunities.
 This step can be thought of as the opportunity funnel
because it brings together inputs from across the
enterprise.

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 Step 2: Evaluate and Prioritize Projects
 If managed actively, the opportunity funnel can
collect hundreds or even thousands of opportunities
during a year.
 Some of these opportunities do not make sense in
the context of the firm’s other activities, and in most
cases, there are simply too many opportunities for
the firm to pursue at once.
 The second step in the product planning process is
therefore to select the most promising projects to
pursue.

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 Competitive Strategy
An organization’s competitive strategy defines a basic approach to markets and products with respect to
competitors. The choice of which opportunities to pursue can be guided by this strategy.
Most firms devote much discussion at senior management levels to their strategic competencies and the
ways in which they aim to compete. Several strategies are possible, such as:

 Technology leadership: To implement this strategy, the firm places great emphasis on basic
research and development of new technologies and on the deployment of these technologies
through product development.
 Cost leadership: This strategy requires the firm to compete on production efficiency, either through
economies of scale, use of superior manufacturing methods, low-cost labor, or better management of
the production system. Design for manufacturing methods are therefore emphasized in the product
(and process) development activities under this strategy.
 Customer focus: To follow this strategy, the firm works closely with new and existing customers to
assess their changing needs and preferences. Carefully designed product platforms facilitate the
rapid development of derivative products with new features or functions of interest to customers. This
strategy may result in a broad product line featuring high product variety in order to address the
needs of heterogeneous customer segments.
 Imitative: This strategy involves closely following trends in the market, allowing competitors to
explore which new products are successful for each segment. When viable opportunities have been
identified, the firm quickly launches new products to imitate the successful competitors. A fast
development process is essential to effectively implement this strategy.

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 Market Segmentation
 Customers can be usefully thought of as belonging to distinct market
segments
 Dividing a market into segments allows the firm to consider the actions
of competitors and the strength of the firm’s existing products with
respect to each well defined group of customers.
 By mapping competitors’ products and the firm’s own products onto
segments, the firm can assess which product opportunities best
address weaknesses in its own product line and which exploit
weaknesses in the offerings of competitors.

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 Technological Trajectories

 The product planning decision is when to develop a

product with a new technology, as opposed to developing
another product based on existing technology.
 Technology S-curves are a conceptual tool to help think
about such decisions.

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Technology S Curve

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Product maturity “S” curve

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 Product Platform Planning

 The product platform is the set of assets shared across a

set of products.
 Components and subassemblies are often the most
important of these assets.
 An effective platform can allow a variety of derivative
products to be created more rapidly and easily, with each
product providing the features and functions desired by a
particular market segment.
 Since platform development projects can take from 2 to 10
times as much time and money as derivative product
development projects, a firm cannot afford to make every
project a new platform.

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 Step 3: Allocate Resources and Plan Timing
 Many organizations take on too many projects without regard for the
limited availability of development resources.
 As a result, skilled engineers and managers are assigned to more and
more projects, productivity drops off dramatically, projects take longer
to complete, products become late to the market, and profits are lower.
 Aggregate planning helps an organization make efficient use of its
resources by pursuing only those projects that can reasonably be
completed with the budgeted resources.
 Estimating the resources required for each of the projects in the plan
by month, quarter, or year forces the organization to face the realities
of finite resources.
 Estimates of required resources in each period can be compared with
available resources to compute an overall capacity utilization ratio.

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 Project Timing
Timing of product introductions: Generally the sooner a product is
brought to market the better. However, launching a product before it is of
adequate quality can damage the reputation of the firm.
Technology readiness: The robustness of the underlying technologies
plays a critical role in the planning process. A proven, robust technology
can be integrated into products much more quickly and reliably.
Market readiness: The sequence of product introductions determines
whether early adopters buy the low-end product and may trade up or
whether they buy the high-end product offered at a high initial price.
Releasing improvements too quickly can frustrate customers who want to
keep up; on the other hand, releasing new products too slowly risks
lagging behind competitors.
Competition: The anticipated release of competing products may
accelerate the timing of development projects.

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 The Product Plan
 The set of projects approved by the planning process, sequenced in
time, becomes the product plan,
 The plan may include a mix of fundamentally new products, platform
projects, and derivative projects of varying size.
 Product plans are updated on a periodic basis, perhaps quarterly or
annually, as part of the firm’s strategic planning activity.

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 Step 4: Complete Pre-Project Planning
• Once the project has been approved, but before substantial resources
are applied, a pre-project planning activity takes place. This activity
involves a small, cross-functional team of people, often known as the
core team.
• At this point, the earlier opportunity statement may be rewritten as a
product vision statement.
• The objective defined by a product vision statement may be very
general.
• It may not say which specific new technologies should be used, nor
does it necessarily specify the goals and constraints of functions such
as production and service operations.

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 Step 5: Reflect on the Results and the Process

 In this final step of the planning and strategy process, the

team should ask several questions to assess the quality of
both the process and the results.

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 Target Specifications
 Specifications spell out in precise, measurable detail what
the product has to do.
 Product specifications do not tell the team how to address
the customer needs, but they do represent an
unambiguous agreement on what the team will attempt to
achieve in order to satisfy the customer needs.

Identify Establish Generate Select Test Set Plan

Customer Target Product Product Product Final Downstream
Needs Specifications Concepts Concepts Concepts Specifications Development

Perform Economic Analysis

Benchmark Competitive Products

Build and Test Models and Prototypes

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 When Are Specifications Established?
 For technology-intensive products, specifications are
established at least twice.
 Immediately after identifying the customer needs, the team
sets target specifications.
 These specifications represent the hopes and aspirations of
the team, but they are established before the team knows
what constraints the product technology will place on what
can be achieved
 The team revisits the specifications while assessing the actual
technological constraints and the expected production costs.
 To set the final specifications, the team must frequently make
hard trade-offs among different desirable characteristics of the
product.
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 Establishing Target Specifications
 The target specifications are established after the
customer needs have been identified but before product
concepts have been generated and the most promising
one(s) selected.
 Later these specifications will be refined based on the
limitations of the product concept actually selected.

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 Target Specifications
The process of establishing the target specifications entails
four steps:
1. Prepare the list of metrics.
2. Collect competitive benchmarking information.
3. Set ideal and marginally acceptable target values.
4. Reflect on the results and the process.

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Understanding the product need.

All
design
problem
s are
poorly
defined.

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 Quality Function Deployment
There are many techniques used to generate engineering
specifications.
• One of the best and currently most popular is called Quality
Function Deployment (QFD).
• What is good about the QFD method is that it is organized to
develop the major pieces of information necessary to
understanding the problem:

 Hearing the voice of the customers

 Developing the specifications or goals for the product
 Finding out how the specifications measure the customers’ desires
 Determining how well the competition meets the goals
 Developing numerical targets to work toward

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 Quality Function Deployment
 The QFD method was developed in Japan in the mid-1970s and
introduced in the United States in the late 1980s.
 Using this method, Toyota was able to reduce the costs of
bringing a new car model to market by over 60% and to
decrease the time required for its development by one-third.

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 Importance of QFD
 No matter how well the design team thinks it understands a
problem, it should employ the QFD method for all original design
or redesign projects.
 In the process, the team will learn what it does not know about
the problem.
 The customers’ requirements must be translated into
measurable design targets for identified critical parameters. You
cannot design a car door that is “easy to open” when you do not
know the meaning of “easy.”
 Is easiness measured by force, time, or what? If force is a
critical parameter, then is “easy” 20 N or 40 N? The answer must
be known before much time and resources are invested in the
design effort.

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 Importance of QFD
 The QFD method can be applied to the entire problem and
any sub-problem.
 It is important to first worry about what needs to be designed
and, only after that is understood, to worry about how the
design will look and work.
 Our cognitive capabilities generally lead us to try to
assimilate the customers’ functional requirements (what is to
be designed) in terms of form (how it will look); these images
then become our favored designs and we get locked onto
them.
 The QFD procedure helps overcome this cognitive limitation.

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 Importance of QFD
 This method takes time to complete. In some design
projects, about one-third of the total project time is spent on
this activity.
 Ford spends 3–12 months developing the QFD for a new
feature.
 Experimental evidence has shown that designers who spend
time here end up with better products and do not use any
more total time when compared to others who do a
superficial job here.
 Time spent here saves time later. Not only does the
technique help in understanding the problem, it also helps
set the foundation for concept generation.

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QFD – House of Quality

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QFD House of Quality

Interrelationships
Customer
importance
How to satisfy
ratings
customer needs

Competitive
assessment
What the Relationship
customer matrix
needs

Target values Weighted

rating
Technical
evaluation

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 STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE CUSTOMERS:
WHO ARE THEY?
 For most design situations, there is
more than one customer; for many
products, the most important
customers are the consumers, the
people who will buy the product and
who will tell other consumers about
its quality (or lack thereof).
 Sometimes the purchaser of the
product is not the same as its user
(e.g., gym equipment, school desks,
and office desks)

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 STEP 2: DETERMINE THE CUSTOMERS’
REQUIREMENTS: WHAT DO THE CUSTOMERS
WANT?
 The consumers want a product that works as it
should, lasts a long time, is easy to maintain,
looks attractive, incorporates the latest
technology, and has many features.
 Typically, the production customer wants a
product that is easy to produce (both
manufacture and assemble), uses available
resources (human skills, equipment, and raw
materials), uses standard parts and methods,
uses existing facilities, and produces a minimum
of scraps and rejected parts.
 Typically, the marketing/sales customer wants a
product that meets consumers’ requirements; is
easy to package, store, and transport; is
attractive; and is suitable for display.
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 STEP 3: DETERMINE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF
THE REQUIREMENTS: WHO VERSUS WHAT
 The next step in the QFD technique is
evaluating the importance of each of the
customers’ requirements. This is
accomplished by generating a weighting
factor for each requirement and entering it in
the QFD diagram.
 The weighting will give an idea of how much
effort, time, and money to invest in achieving
each requirement.
 Two questions are addressed here:
 (1) to whom is the requirement important?
 and (2) how is a measure of importance
developed for this diverse group of
requirements?
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 STEP 4: IDENTIFY AND EVALUATE THE
COMPETITION: HOW SATISFIED ARE THE
CUSTOMERS NOW?
 The goal here is to determine how the customer
perceives the competition’s ability to meet each
of the requirements.
 Even though you may be working with a totally
new design, there is competition, or at least
products that come close to filling the same
need that your product does.
 The purpose for studying existing products is
twofold: first, it creates an awareness of what
already exists (the “now”), and second, it reveals
opportunities to improve on what already exists.
 In some companies, this process is called
competition benchmarking and is a major aspect
of understanding a design problem.

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 STEP 5: GENERATE ENGINEERING
SPECIFICATIONS: HOW WILL THE CUSTOMERS’
REQUIREMENTS BE MET?
 The goal here is to develop a set of
engineering specifications from the
customers’ requirements.
 These specifications are the restatement of
the design problem in terms of parameters
that can be measured and have target
values.
 Without such information the engineers
cannot know if the system being developed
will satisfy the customers.
 Engineering specifications consist of
parameters of interest and targets for
parameters.
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 STEP 6: RELATE CUSTOMERS’ REQUIREMENTS TO
ENGINEERING SPECIFICATIONS: HOW TO
MEASURE WHAT?
 To complete this step, we fill in the
center portion of the house of quality.
 This relationship matrix is completed in
parallel to Step 5, and it yields
additional knowledge.
 Each cell of the form represents how
an engineering specification

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 STEP 7: SET ENGINEERING SPECIFICATION
TARGETS AND IMPORTANCE: HOW MUCH
IS GOOD ENOUGH?
 In this step we fill in the basement of
the house of quality.
 Here we set the targets and establish
how important it is to meet each of
them.
 There are three parts to this effort,
calculate the specification importance,
measure how well the competition
meets the specification, and develop
targets for your effort.

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 STEP 8: IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
ENGINEERING SPECIFICATIONS: HOW ARE THE
HOWS DEPENDENT ON EACH OTHER?
 Engineering specifications may be
dependent on each other.
 It is best to realize these dependencies
early in the design process.
 Thus, the roof is added to show that as
you work to meet one specification, you
may be having a positive or negative
affect on others.

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 Thank you

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