Chapter 3: Product Design and Selection of Production Process

Introduction

Product design is the process of deciding on the characteristics and features of the company’s product based on customer’s needs and requirements. The purpose of the product decision is to develop and implement a product strategy that meets the demands of the market with a competitive advantage. The focus of the product strategy for a competitive advantage can be differentiation, low cost, fast response or a combination of them.

Product Selection

In order to maximize the success of potential products, companies focus on only a narrow range of products and then concentrate on those products. The core competences of those products are the key factors for the success of the company. While right product selection decision increases the success of the company in the market, wrong decisions lead to catastrophe of the company.

The Product Life Cycle

The phases of the products in the product life cycle are birth or introduction, growth, maturity and decline.

Introduction (Birth): The purpose of the company is to build product awareness in the market.

Growth: The product takes hold and both product and market continue to be refined.

Maturity: The objective of the company should be to maintain and improve the brand loyalty that is provided in the growth phase while maximizing profit.

Decline: Some decisions must be made on whether to finish the production of the product and replace it with new ones or try to find new uses of it or new markets for the current product. Since companies know that products they sell have a limited lifespan, most of them invest heavily in new product development in order to make sure that their businesses continue to grow.

Product Strategy

Product selection is to choose the goods for the satisfaction of the customer. Product designs play an effective role in the development of high quality and efficiency. The followings are some of the essential activities and responsibilities of a product design: Reflect customer needs and requirements to product requirements, refine or modify current products, develop new products, formulate quality goals and cost targets, construct and test prototypes, document specifications, translate product specifications into process specifications.

Product Development and Design Process

An effective product strategy connects decisions about the product to other business functions such as research and development, operations, marketing and finance.

Product Development Process

Activities required to bring a new concept to a state of market readiness involve everything from the initial inspiring new product vision, to business case analysis activities, marketing efforts, technical engineering design activities, development of manufacturing plans, and the validation of the product design to conform to these plans. Product development does not mean just product management, instead it is a broad process for bringing products to market which involves many teams across a company, such as product management, marketing, design, testing and distribution. In the product development process, creativity, understanding, communication, testing and persuasion activities are essential for the success. Product development process is separated into three phases:

1. Understand the opportunity
2. Develop a concept
3. Implement a concept.

Understand the opportunity: The first step in this phase is to develop a vision for a new product. The development team tries to understand the requirements of the potential customers and how they are satisfied by competitors.

Develop a concept: It is about product positioning in the market and portfolio planning and development.

Implement a concept: This is called embodiment engineering. Embodiment involves modeling and testing of the physical construction. Production planning and manufacturing process design show the finish line of the product development and most of the time production of the developed product is initiated.

The Design Process

Design activity is one of the major activities of business either for the service company or manufacturing company. Generally, the design is the activity of conception, planning and implementation. Design is not a random combination of elements, but it is the output of some planned activity to create some new things for a specific purpose. It is the combination of style and appearance that products attract customers.

Walsh et al. (1992) identify four “Cs” of design:

Creativity: Creation of something not previously existed.

Complexity: Design for a wide variety of parameters and elements such as shape, texture and color to materials.

Compromise: It is a type of trade-off between some elements and features such as performance and cost or weight and ease of use.

Choice: It is about coming to decisions on the concept solution to color or form.

Creativity can be defined as “the generation of novel ideas”. Therefore, management of creativity is a serious task and comes with innovation that involves bringing something new into widespread use, not just inventing it. Another major feature of creativity is that it is not a totally conscious or rational process. Working with customers and suppliers can yield original ideas. Innovation is the successful application of new ideas in practice in the form of new or improved products, processes. Although product development process is shortly described in three phases, it will be useful to describe the main stages of design process separately as shown below:

Stimulus/trigger: This can be a new idea coming from a variety of sources. Research and development department effort is another source of ideas for new or improved products.

Concept development: The idea is evaluated in terms of viability for the company, based on its strengths, capabilities and market demands.

Project planning: A product plan should be prepared for the explanation of objectives, allocation of resources and planning of timescales and budgets.

Design brief: Designers prepare reports for the project including objectives, work schedule, task list and budget.

Sourcing design skills: The design team that will work in the design process can be an in-house team, or solely an external team or a combination of external and in-house designers.

Concept design: After having an outline of the design idea, sketches and simple models of it are made for sharing it with others.

Design specification: Drawings and models of the actual design are made and details of the design are decided on these drawings and models.

Concept development: The concept is elaborated and missing and incomplete information is collected.

Prototype and testing: Mock-up, model or some other preliminary version of the final design is made.

Detailed design: After discussions about the final design, agreed design is converted into detailed specifications.

Market development: Problems about the design are found in terms of market.

Technical development: If there are some technical problems these problems are found and solved.

Launch: This stage shows the end of the design phase. The designed product is introduced to the market after its production in the company.

Evaluation: This stage is about the analysis of the process and the project outcome.

Support and extension: After the launch of the product, close relation with users and access to their feedback about the product is easy to achieve.

Re-innovation: Every feedback is a lesson for the company and an input for further innovation.

There is no guarantee of success in design, however there are some success factors that summarized as shown below, to enhance the management of process: Commitment of top management, clear explanation of the concept, take into consideration the voice of the customer, unique features of the product, early detection of problems, close monitoring of each design stage, parallel working of design and operations, multi-disciplinary team working in design, usage of advanced support tools such as CAD, prototyping, etc, continuous improvement.

The followings are the design principles to simplify the products and processes.

1. Minimize the number of parts used
2. Use common components and processes
3. Use standard components and tools
4. Simplify assembly
5. Use modularity to obtain variety
6. Make product specifications and tolerances reasonable
7. Design products to be robust

Minimize the number of parts used: A simple product is easy to make with high quality and low cost. Simplification also means that fewer tools, separate fasteners and adjustments are used.

Use common components and processes: In order to reduce the number of parts used, the design team can use parts that are common across several products or used in several processes. Another important advantage of using common components is to improve the quality in different ways.

Use standard components and tools:

Using standard components gives the company an opportunity of cost saving, high quality and good performance. Standardization is another issue that arises in both product design and process design.

Simplify assembly: Assembly simplification can be made easily by using preliminary production documents such as assembly drawings and assembly charts. Assembly chart is a schematic diagram of how and in what sequence the components of the product will be assembled.

Four product design characteristics especially affect the ease and quality of assembly:

1. Fasteners: Many of the activities of assembly labor is to fasten one component to another by bolts, screws or snaps.
2. Orientation and accessibility in assembly: The sequence of assembly and the orientation of components in an assembly task are crucial.
3. Design for testing: Most of the products with complex structure require testing after the assembly.
4. Mistake-proof assembly: One way of simplifying the assembly process is to design the product and components so that it is difficult or impossible to make mistakes. It is called mistake-proof assembly or Poka-Yoke.

Mistake proofing, or Poka-Yoke is the use of any automatic device or method that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred.

Use modularity to obtain product variety: Companies produce a variety of model options for a product in order to satisfy a wide array of customers. Modularity is dividing the product into modules and then determining which variations of each module would be desirable from a marketing and manufacturing viewpoint.

Make product specifications and tolerances reasonable: When the specification of a component is very demanding, the cost of it is high. So, physical properties of the components should not be more demanding than needed even under extreme conditions.

Design for robustness: Because of the variations in materials, wear on equipment and fatigue of the worker variations can emerge in the production. So, the quality of production reduces. In order to prevent this, a procedure called robust design has been introduced. Another important point of robust design is to accommodate the attribute variations for minimizing their effects on product performance and quality such as thickness or weight of a component.

Product Design Tools

The followings are some of the important product design tools that tried to be explained briefly.

Quality Function Deployment

QFD is transferring the voice of the customer to the design specifications of a product. QFD is a process and set of tools used to effectively define customer requirements and convert them into detailed engineering specifications and plans to produce the products that fulfill those requirements. Defining the relationship is the first step in building a world-class production system. To build the house of quality, the following seven basic steps need to be followed:

1. Identify customer needs and requirements.
2. Identify how the goods will satisfy customer needs and requirements.
3. Relate customer needs and requirements to product hows by building a matrix.
4. Identify relationships between the company’s hows.
5. Determine importance ratings.
6. Evaluate competing products.
7. Determine the desirable technical attributes, company’s attributes, and the competitor’s performance against these attributes.

Value Analysis

Value analysis is a method for improving the usefulness of a product with no increase in cost or decrease the cost with no decrease in the usefulness of the product. The purpose of value analysis is to simplify products and processes in order to achieve equivalent or better performance at a lower cost while maintaining all functional requirements defined by the customer. Three most important points of this methodology are:

• Usage of multi-disciplinary teams
• A systematic approach to the comparison of product functionality and value
• Concentration on the simplification of the product

The followings are some of the most important benefits of value analysis:

• It is a powerful tool for cost reduction since its objective is to identify and eliminate unnecessary costs and increases the productivity of the company by efficient use of all kinds of resources.
• It helps the company follow the latest technology and other improvements and promotes creativity and innovation
• It can be applied at every step of the production of a product either in initial design or final step of its packing and dispatch.
• Customer satisfaction is high and management effectiveness can be measured easily.

The Taguchi Method

This method is based on robust design which is a design that results in products that can perform over a wide range of conditions. The followings are the three basic principles of this method.

1. When the value of a product attribute such as width, temperature, length, deviates from its target value, the cost to society in terms of lower quality increases more than linearly.
2. Variation of the product attributes is determined by both the design features of the product and the production process.
3. Product and process characteristics that affect product attributes can be determined by experimentation and products can be designed to decrease attribute variations by manipulating these characteristics that result from normal production variations.

Taguchi determines the quantity of customer preferences toward on-target quality in the quality loss function. Taguchi method uses parameter design which is an engineering method for product or process design that focuses on determining the parameter settings giving the best levels of a quality characteristic with minimum variation.

Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent engineering is a method that takes many people from different disciplines together in the early stage of product design in order to simultaneously design the product and the process. This approach is called “overthewall” since the designs are finished separately then pass to the operations unit. It is a sequential design with walls between functional areas. This old approach is very inefficient, timeconsuming and costly. Another problem of the old approach is that it takes a longer amount of time since the work is done in sequence. The implementation of this method focuses on three areas: people, process, and technology. In order to achieve the required results in the organization, concurrent engineering must be well managed and controlled.

Selection of the Production Process

Selection of the right production process requires the consideration of many factors. Some of the most important ones are the volume and the variety of products to be produced, trade-offs between the cost of the production and the flexibility of it, compatibility with the organization’s product portfolio, company’s orderwinning dimensions, and the relative costs and risks.

Production Process Types

In this classification there are three types of processes: make-to-stock, make-to-order and assemble-to-order.

Make-to-stock process: In a make-to stock production, business processes can remain stable and unchanged.

Make-to-order process: The critical and important performance measure of this process is the lead time which is the length of time to design and produce the product. Another one is the percentage of orders completed on time.

Assemble-to-order process: Assemble-to-order provides flexibility, speed and helps reduce waste. Another classification of the production processes can be made according to physical configuration, material and product flow, product variation and volume expectation. processes are classified according to product flow and volume expectations into the following four categories:

1. Flow processes
2. Job-shop processes
3. Cellular processes
4. Project processes

Flow processes : In this process, products are produced following the same process in the same sequence. There are three types of flow processes which are continuous flow processes, repetitive or discrete flow processes and disconnected or batch flow processes.

Job-shop processes: A high variety products in small batches with different processing requirements are produced. The production is usually started by the order of the customer and the products are customized.

Cellular processes: It is a hybrid production process that tries to take the opportunity of the efficiency of flow processes and the flexibility of job-shop processes. It provides a clear advantage by the improved material flow and reduces the traveling distance by materials, inventory, people which increases the overall lead times.

Project processes: This process is used when there is high customization and low volume of product. Some of the most important factors that are critical for this selection are product variety and the volume of production. The variety and volume of products to be produced in the company are affected by whether the company sells the products that are made to stock or made to order. Another important point for the selection of the process is that some companies can use different processes for different kinds of products and the best fitting process may change over time when new products are introduced and the current ones mature and die.

Product-Process Matrix

It is important to be close to the diagonal of the matrix when the company matches its products and processes. The product-process matrix can provide a company to perceive its marketing and operations strategies together. The product-process matrix helps companies in selecting technologies and products, as well. When the company knows the place of itself on the matrix, its competitive advantages and phases of its products on the life cycle, the company can easily make decisions about adding or dropping a product, expanding capacity, creating special processes or increasing process flexibility. Another important help of this matrix is to see the exact position of the production structure of the company on the matrix and prevent product proliferation by showing the effects of adding or dropping products to the production process.