Product and Service Design Chapter Summary

Product and service design is a key factor in satisfying the customer. To be successful in product and service design, organizations must be continually aware of what customers want, what the competition is doing, what government regulations are, and what new technologies are available. The design process involves motivation, ideas for improvement, organizational capabilities, and forecasting. In addition to product life cycles, legal, environmental, and ethical considerations influence design choices. What degree of standardization designers should incorporate into designs is also an important consideration. Key objectives for designers are to achieve a product or service design that will meet or exceed customer expectations, that is within cost or budget, and that takes into account the capabilities of operations. Although product design and service design are similar in some respects, a number of key differences exist between products and services that influence the way they are designed. Successful design often incorporates many of these basic principles: Determine what customers want as a starting point; minimize the number of parts needed to manufacture an item or the number of steps to provide a service; simplify assembly or service, standardize as much as possible; and make the design robust. Trade-off decisions are common in design, and they involve such things as development time and cost, product or service cost, special features/performance, and product or service complexity. Research and development efforts can play a significant role in product and process innovations, although these are sometimes so costly that only large companies or governments can afford to underwrite them. Reliability of a product or service is often a key dimension in the eyes of the customer. Measuring and improving reliability are important aspects of product and service design, although other areas of the organization also have an influence on reliability. Quality function deployment is one approach for getting customer input for product or service design.

Key Ideas

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Relevant considerations in planning a product or service system include: research, design, production, life cycle, safety in use, reliability, maintainability, regulatory and legal problems. A marketable product is not always profitable. The reasons for this include: a. poor design that leads to an unsafe product may cause accidents that will result in future product liability lawsuits. the development may take so long that the product is being marketed past the time of peak demand. the competition may produce a better product.

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There are five stages to the product-demand life cycle: incubation, growth, maturity, and decline. The production/operations system becomes an active participant early in the cycle, because of the need to plan production facilities. Basic research is research that contributes knowledge but not products directly; applied research contributes knowledge about products; development contributes products; production/operations management delivers the products. Computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD-CAM) enhance the productivity of both design and production personnel, because the computer can assimilate enormous quantities of information, display the consequences of a design or a course of action, and institute programmed controls of the manufacturing process. Standardization of parts, components, and modularization, or standardizing larger components that might be used in several different products, has advantages for many reasons, including: reducing inventories; enhancing employee, customer and vendor familiarity; making it easier to purchase raw materials and component parts; and routinizing production and quality assurance activities. There are also some possible disadvantages in reduced consumer appeal and possible freezing of imperfect designs, with subsequent costly changeovers. Some companies are offsetting the lack of variety through mass customization, which involves adding a small degree of customization to standardized goods and services. One approach is delayed differentiation, which involves producing but not quite completing a product or service until customer preferences are known. Another approach is modular design, which involves standard modules (groups of parts or services) which can be assembled in several different ways (or used or not used) to achieve variety.

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An important aspect of the design process is to design for manufacturability. This means avoiding designs that would require costly or time-consuming steps, or steps that would make it difficult to achieve desired quality levels. Instead, designers need to be aware of manufacturing capabilities, and create products that are easy to produce, and lend themselves to achieving desired quality levels. The design of services differs in many respects from the design of products, because of certain basic differences that exist between products and services. For example, services tend to have higher customer contact than manufacturing, and services tend to be intangible. Also, services cant be inventoried. See p. 147 in your textbook. Robust design refers to products or services that are relatively insensitive to some change in operating conditions. That is, products (or services) with robust design have a broader range of conditions under which they can function in an acceptable manner than products (or services) that do not have this feature. That can be a real advantage in terms of reliability and customer satisfaction.

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10. The product designer has an ethical obligation to design products and services so as to avoid damaging or polluting the environment, to employ safe manufacturing processes, and to assure that the product is harmless in its intended uses. 11. Reverse engineering refers to the dismantling of another firms product to learn about any special features that can be adapted to ones own products.

Glossary
applied research basic research computer aided design concurrent engineering delayed differentiation design for assembly design for disassembly design for manufacturing (manufacturability) design for operations design for recycling research that is directed towards achieving commercial applications. research that is directed at the growth of scientific knowledge, without any near-term expectations of commercial applications. product design using computer graphics. bringing engineering and manufacturing personnel together early in the design phase. partially producing the product or service and completing it when the customer's preferences or specifications are known. reducing the number of parts in an assembly as simplifying the assembly methods that will be employed in its manufacture. making it easier to take apart used products by using fewer parts and snap-fits where possible. designing products with manufacturing capabilities in mind, so as to make them easy to produce, and to make it easy to avoid mistakes. taking into account the capabilities of the organization to deliver a particular product or service. designing products to allow for disassembly in order to recover

components and materials for reuse. Development end item failure life cycle Manufacturability mass customization converts the results of applied research into useful commercial applications. a product sold or delivered to the ultimate user. a product, part, or system does not perform as intended. the incubation, growth, maturity, saturation and decline of a product or service. the ease of fabrication and/or assembly. producing standardized goods or services, but incorporating some degree of customization into the final product or service. a form of standardization in which component parts are subdivided into modules that are easily replaced or interchanged. the set of conditions under which an item's reliability is specified. all activities connected with bringing a new product to market. See the nine elements of product design on p. in your textbook. a manufacturer is liable for any injuries or damages caused by a product which is faulty due to poor workmanship, defective parts, or poor design.

modular design

normal operating conditions product design product liability

quality function deployment integrating the "voice of the customer" into product and service (QFD) design. recycling reliability remanufacturing recovering parts or material for future use. the ability of a product or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of conditions. refurbishing used products for resale.

research and development organized efforts to increase scientific knowledge or to improve (R&D) the product or to develop new products. reverse engineering robust design service service blueprint dismantling another firm's product to learn about its special features. design that results in products or services that can perform over a broad range of operating conditions. something that is done to or for a customer. a method used in service design to describe and analyze a process.

service bundle service delivery system service package

the combination of goods and services provided to a customer. the facilities, processes and skills needed to provide a service. the physical resources needed to perform the service, the accompanying goods, and the explicit and implicit services

included. standardization the absence of variety in a product, process, or service. The extent to which all of the products are similar to each other, or the extent to which every customer receives the same service. requires that every product be usable for its intended purposes.

Uniform Commercial Code