April 16, 2019

New Product Design and Production



New Product Development and Design tasks are part of operations function.

Designing a product or service or buying the design or getting the design in case of contract manufacturer is what brings into existence a business entity in the first place and then onwards expansion occurs as new product units (Finished goods SKUs),  business lines and SBUs.

New product design and development activity is a combined effort of three major functions: Marketing, New product development (Design and Development) and Manufacturing. Marketing provides customer viewpoint, product development links the customer requirements and technical scope into product, manufacturing provides the production view to be captured into product design and process plan. These three functions are supported by Industrial Engineering Function to make the design more efficient economically.

Chase, Jacobs, Acquilano identified Concept development, Product planning, Product/Process Engineering and Pilot production/Ramp-up as significant stages in introducing a new product into market.

In the concept development, the product architecture is specified taking into consideration the new customer needs as identified by the marketing function. The product architecture converts the functional requirements of the product into product's components and sub-assemblies  that will provide the functions as a group. The product architecture is subjected to market evaluation and project evaluation. If  it passes this gate, approval is given for making a development sample of the product without detailed engineering. This product is subjected to technical testing and marketing testing and once again project evaluation is done. If it clears this second gate of customer acceptance of the development sample, detailed engineering is approved. Based on the detailed engineering, prototypes are made. Another round of technical and market evaluations are conducted. Clearing of this gate would result in approval for pilot plant. The pilot plan would produce the actual production output and a test marketing is now done for a final demand assessment. This final demand assessment is the basis for capacity decisions of the commercial plant.

In 11th Edition (2006), they described the generic process of new product development as

Planning,
Concept development,
System level design,
Design detail,
Testing and refinement, and
Production ramp-up

During concept development experimental prototypes are built and tested.

After detail design, prototypes are once again built this time with the components as specified in the detail design but not exclusively using processes specified for commercial production. These prototypes are used for technical testing of the detailed design and market tests for product acceptance.


My personal thought is that generic process of new product development function must start with preparation.

Preparation Phase or Activity of New Product Development Function  (Addition by Me)


During this activity, the new product development department develops it capability to develop new products. It includes monitoring research taking place in the areas related to its current and potential product portfolio by subscribing and studying the research journals, attending research conferences, going through scientific and technical magazines, and handbooks. These activities would also help the department to monitor the development activities being undertaken by other organizations. Patents applied for and issues have also to be monitored by the department. Some research may be undertaken by the department or it may sponsor research in academic institutions or public or private research institutions. It will be depute its designers and developers to various training programs related to the process and management of new product development.

Concurrent Engineering


Concurrent engineering approach made possible by computer aided design and the option for making the designs-in-process visible to other departments made possible for more concurrent activities in the design process. Whereas earlier, these processes were serial, in the sense, manufacturing can't gives its view until a design was finalized and sent to it for comments by the design department. But now, the designs are visible to the manufacturing on real time basis and their comments can be given and activities at their end can commence without delay involved due to lack of information and formal handover procedures.

Industrial Design


Designing products for ease of customer use and aesthetics developed as a separate subject termed Industrial design.

Quality Function Deployment


It is a process involving marketing, design engineering and manufacturing to interact with the customers and get their voice into the new product or redesign of the existing product. In this activity, the customer requirements are found out, their priority is determined and customers are asked to compare the company's product with competitor's product in the terms of satisfying the customer. The redesign of the product is carried out to increase customer satisfaction with product and once again customers are asked to evaluate the new product and competitor's product as well as the earlier version of the company's product.

Product Design Efficiency Engineering

Value Analysis - Value Engineering (VAVE)


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Effectiveness and efficiency are the twin dimensions that are there in every business decision. Once effectiveness decisions, those. which are required by the customers in terms of functional benefits and aesthetic benefits are finalized, the efficiency decisions are to be taken. The product designs have to be subjected to efficiency analysis and engineering. Value engineering is currently the popular technique for efficiency engineering. There are ideas in method study and cost reduction areas also for product design efficiency evaluation. But most of them are incorporated into value engineering also. Value engineering is a cost reduction method where the cost reduction benchmark is obtained by finding the lowest cost at which a similar function is being performed.

Designing Products for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA)


Product design has to ensure that manufacturing and assembly feasibility and cost are appropriately considered in the design process.

Reducing the number of parts is an important concern of DFMA. For this purpose for each separate part, the following questions are to be answered by the designer.

1. Does the part move relative to all other parts?
2. Must the part be made of different material?
3. Must the part be separate from all other parts to allow the disassembly of the product for adjustment or maintenance?

Summaries of All Chapters of the Book Product Design and Development by Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger
Product Design and Development - Summary Chapters


New Product Production Capacity Development - Issues

Production Capacity Development
Definition
Production capacity development encompasses process planning; design, quality, tool, and factory industrial engineering; facilities planning; training; and production staffing.

Present Practice
In most industries, manufacturing, marketing, and product design are separate management areas that often have conflicting goals and communicate very little with one another. As it stands today, the many systems that support these individual areas cannot be integrated to provide a seamless view of the capabilities of the organization.

Vision
A need exists for close coordination among design, manufacturing, and marketing departments to produce good models of production capacity that can be integrated with models of material flow and process capability.

All the information needed for production capacity analysis, though highly detailed and existing in different systems, will be online and available. Organizations will make information available wherever it is needed throughout the product life cycle, and they will have the data integration and communications capabilities that will enable them to do so.

Production
Definition
Production is the means by which raw materials are transformed into products of appropriate quality at minimum time and cost. Production assumes a detailed product definition, including a description of function, geometry, materials, and tolerances, a process plan, and production capability.

Present Practice
Production delays are often caused by engineering design that optimizes functionality and ignores the impact of design on later stages of the product life cycle, such as fabrication, assembly, testing, distribution, field service, and reclamation. The extent to which a design is feasible from a cost and quality perspective is limited by the available set of processes; poor choice of tooling may lead to inefficient use of production facilities (as recent experience with flexible manufacturing systems has demonstrated), and designs that specify too many parts can increase both the cost and complexity of assembly.

Control of production processes has become more complex with the introduction of programmable automation and the greater flexibility of machining centers and robotics. Yet existing control systems are barely able to manage the factory of the past, let alone the factory of today or of the future. Resource competition also complicates shop floor control. Bottlenecks caused by competition for resources are a major impediment to productivity, and batch sizes continue to be reduced to meet rapidly changing demand, exacerbating the difficulty of allocating resources. Finally, the ability to control production is limited by the accuracy and timeliness of information from the factory floor. Current information acquisition systems, designed to support accounting-related tasks, do not meet the information needs of a dynamic control system.

Production knowledge is limited by the artificial separation of engineering and manufacturing. Traditional principles that exhort managers to break down organizations into pieces that are more easily managed have led to the separation (logically and often geographically) of engineering and manufacturing groups. This separation has impeded communication and coordination to the point that the two groups no longer speak the same language.

Vision
The ability to adapt rapidly to new materials and processes or new knowledge in engineering and science ultimately will reduce production costs while simultaneously increasing product quality. Consequently, next-generation control systems (as explained


in Chapter 2, Intelligent Manufacturing Control) will be highly flexible, able to analyze the production situation, and make the best control decision in view of current goals, opportunities, and constraints. These systems will also monitor their own performance, at both the unit process and shop levels, identify poor performance, and diagnose and eliminate the cause. As production systems become more complex diagnoses will be based on deep models of the process, necessitating reliance on model-based reasoning.

Communication will extend beyond the factory floor. Production managers will communicate, coordinate, and negotiate with earlier and later stages in the product life cycle, negotiate changes in product definition to optimize production cost and quality while design is still under way, and contract with suppliers to guarantee availability of the necessary materials and parts. Production managers also will have the latitude to identify and communicate to other stages of the life cycle significant production events, such as quality problems caused by design decisions, customer feedback, and consequences of vendor/supplier interactions. Such integration will be necessary whether production is tightly coupled to colocated product life-cycle stages, such as engineering, within the same firm or is done in a separate facility that works with other firms.

Production will have more powerful management systems that acquire, filter, and communicate significant information to those who need it. This capability will be applied within a dynamic, real-time environment, necessitating the existence of a model of the factory that is precise, accurate, and realistic. The speed with which new materials, processes, and products are introduced will leave little time to analyze them thoroughly in order to optimize production quality. Optimization of production quality will, instead, be achieved over time by new tools for continuous improvement of process models and control strategies.


Source for Production System Development     https://www.nap.edu/read/1618/chapter/7


Summaries of all Chapters of Operation Management


MBA Core Management Knowledge - One Year Revision Schedule

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