Product Design and Development

1. Product Design and Development Chapter 3, 4 & 5 – Product Planning, Customer Needs & Product Specifications

2. Four types of Product Development • New product platforms • Derivatives of existing product platforms • Incremental improvements to existing products • Fundamentally new products

3. Planning Process (chapter 3) • Identify opportunities • Evaluate and prioritize projects • Allocate resources and plan timing • Complete pre-project planning • Product development process

4. 5 Steps to Product Planning For each task, the plan states the objectives, the personnel requirements, the time requirements, the schedule relative to other tasks, projects and programs, and sometimes cost estimates • STEP #1: Identify the Tasks • Should be made as specific as possible • STEP #2: State the objective for each task • Each task should have a clearly stated objective and must be: • Easily understood by the design team • Specific in terms of exactly what information is to be developed; if concepts are need, specify how many are sufficient • Feasible, give the equipment, personnel, and time available.

5. STEP #3: Estimate the personnel, time, and other resources need to meet the objectives. •  STEP #4: Develop a sequence for the tasks • Goal is to have each task accomplished before the result is needed while at the same time making use of all personnel all the time. • Milestone or Gantt charts are often used • STEP #5: Estimate the product development costs Information needed Task activity Information gathered Means to accomplish task

6. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #1: Identify the customers • Usually more than one customer • Can be person who ultimately buys the product • Can be another person in your company who may use the device you design • Think broadly about the customer • Must design what the customer wants, not what the designer thinks the customer should want Recall that the Chief objective of product design is satisfying the customer(s)

7. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #2: Determine the customers’ requirements • Can be interviews, collected by observations, surveys, and focus groups • When developing questions for the customer: • Do not assume that the customers have more than common knowledge • Do not use jargon • Do not lead the customer toward the answer you want • Do not tangle two question together • Use complete sentences

8. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #3: Determine the relative importance of the requirements (who versus what) • Customer’s requirements ranked by giving a weight factor for each requirement. • Print or write each need statement on a separate card or sticky note. • Eliminate redundant statements • Group statements according to similarity • Label each group (potential of creating sub-groups)

9. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #4: Identify and evaluate the competition • Creates an awareness of what already exists and reveals opportunities to improve on what already exists • Subjective comparison that is based on customer opinion. • For each customer requirement, we rate the existing design on a scale of 1-5. • The design does not meet the requirement at all. • The design meets the requirement slightly. • The design meets the requirement somewhat. • The design meets the requirement mostly. • The design fulfills the requirement completely. • If all competition ranks low for a certain requirement, there is a definite opportunity for improvement • If one of the competitors meets the requirement completely, it should be studied as a source of good ideas.

10. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step#5: Generate engineering specifications • Goal is to create 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. • May be separated into: • Target Specifications - established per the customer needs, broad ranges of values • Final Design Specifications – more details based on priority of design criteria Be careful not to include a possible solution to the problem as part of your engineering requirements.

11. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step#6: Relate customers’ requirements to engineering specifications • Some parameters will impact more than one customer requirement • The relationship can be classified as strong (9), medium (3), weak (1), or no relationship at all.

12. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #7: Identifying the relationships between engineering requirements • Trade offs - Some engineering requirements are affected by others in a positive way (+) or negative way(-). A positive relationship means that pursuing one engineering requirement helps another requirement whereas a negative relationship means that pursuing one engineering requirement hurts another. • Goal of this step is to understand how the engineering requirements are interrelated.

13. Developing Customer Requirement and Engineering Specifications • Step #8: Set engineering targets • Each engineering requirement should be given a target • Targets are used to evaluate the final product’s ability to satisfy the customers’ requirements. • Initial targets may have a tolerance associated with them. • If a target is much different than the values currently achieved by the competition, it should be questioned.

14. Assembly Group Design • Design concept • Group 1: Dustin, Ed, Michael • Group 2: Paul, Maria, Adam • Group 3: Corey, Ana, Brian • Due 3/24 – Presentation to class