Course Notes IDS 355 3: Product and Service Design

4: Product and Service Design

Charles E. Oyibo

Introduction

The Activities and Responsibilities of Product and Service Design

1. Translate customer wants and needs into product and service requirements (marketing)
2. Refine existing product and services (marketing)
3. Develop new products and/or services (marketing, operations)
4. Formulate quality goals (quality assurance, operations)
5. Formulate cost target (accounting)
6. Construct and test prototypes (marketing, operations)
7. Document specifications

Objectives of Product and Service Design...

...Satistying the customer while making a reasonable profit.

Design for operations: Taking into account the capabilities of the organization in designing goods and services

Manufacturability: The ease of fabrication and/or assembly.

Sources of Ideas for New or Redesigned Products and Services

• Internal Sources
  • Employees
  • Marketing and research
• External Sources
  • Customers (suggestions, surveys or focus groups, quality function deployment (QFD), complaints, product failures, warrantee claims)
  • Competitors (competitors' pricing policies, return policies, warranties, location strategies; reverse engineering)
  • Suppliers (increasingly so, as a result of increasing emphasis on supply chains and supplier partnerships)
• Research & Development: Organized efforts to increase scientific knowledge or product innovation
  • Basic research: advancing the state of knowledge about a subject, without any near-term expectation of commercial application
  • Applied research: has the objective of achieving commercial applications
  • Development: converts the result of applied research into useful commercial applications

Other Issues in Product and Service Design

Life Cycles

• Incubation
• Growth
• Maturity
• Saturation
• Decline

Standardization...

...the extent to which there is absence of variety in a product, service, or process.

Advantages

• Interchangeable parts, lowering the cost of production while increasing productivity and making replacement or repair
• Design costs are generally lower
• Reduced time and cost to train employees, and reduced time to design jobs
• Scheduling or work, inventory handling, and purchasing and accounting activities become much more routine

Disadvantages

• Reduction in variety, creating a risk that a competitor will introduce a product with greater variety
• A manufacturer may freeze (standardize) a design prematurely and, once frozen, it may find compelling reason to resist modification (e.g. the typewrite and computer keyboard key arrangements).

Designing for Mass Customization

• Mass Customization
• Delayed Differentiation
• Modular Design

Reliability

• Reliability
• Failure
• Normal Operating Conditions

Robust Design

• Robust Design
• Taguchi's Approach:

Designing for Manufacturing

Concurrent Engineering...

...bringing engineering design and manufacturing personnel together early in the design phase.

Advantage

1. Manufacturing personel are able to identify production capabilities and capacities

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

Production Requirements

Recycling

Remanufacturing

Component Commonality

Designing for Services

Design Guidelines

1. Have a single, unifying theme, such as convenience or speed
2. Make sure the system has the capability to handle any expected variability in service requirements
3. Include design features and check to ensure that service will be reliable and will provide consistently high quality
4. Design the system to be user-friendly (especially for self-service systems)

Quality Function Deployment

QFD is an approach that integrates "the voice of the customer" into the product development process. The purpose is to ensure that customer requirements are factored into every aspect of the process.

The Kano Model

...describes relationships between customer needs and customer satisfaction for three characteristics of design characteristics:

• "must have" characteristics: those that yield a basic level of satisfaction
• the "expected" characteristics: those that yield a steady increase in customer satisfaction
• the "excitement" characteristics: those that yield a disproportionate increase in customer satisfaction

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Page Last Updated: Thursday September 30, 2004 8:59 PM