Product Design and Service Design

Product design refers to the development of the concept or idea of a product in terms of specifications
which are required for transforming the idea into that product. These specifications are created keeping
in mind the constraints of the production process, feasibility to produce and meeting the customer
expectations without sacrificing the quality. Product design involves activities like creating drawing and
specifications pertaining to sizes and tolerances and deciding on the type of materials to be used etc.
Characteristics of Good Design:- The characteristics of a well-designed products are:1.

Functionality:- While designing the most important consideration is the function that the
product is expected to perform. Products are designed to with a core objective and for
meeting a specific customer need. If the product is unable to meet that very need, the
whole purpose of introducing a new product is defeated e.g. mobile verbal
communication.

2.

Reliability:- It means the dependability on the performance of a product for a designated

period of time, without deterioration in the quality or performance of the product. While
designing a product, the life of the product which it should last is an important
consideration. A consumer expects a certain life span in the product.

3.

Producibility:- it can be defined as the possibility of producing the product in the required
quantity at a feasible cost. A product may be very well designed in terms of functionality
and appearance but if it is not produced in the required quantity and at a favourable cost, it
will not be successful in the market. Producibility includes number of operations that form
the manufacturing process, availability of the necessary materials technology requirements
etc.

4.

Quality:- It means conformance to specifications. A good design ensures the required quality
in a product. The materials and their specifications ascertained while designing play an
important role in making the product durable and reliable. Tolerances in the dimensions of
individual parts affect the final quality of the assembled product.

5.

Standardization and Simplification:- Standardization means use of minimum number of

parts to serve the maximum number of purpose, in order to achieve economy in
manufacture and to ensure operational efficiency and efficiency and effectiveness.

Simplification is the process of making design simple. Complicating things which can be
made simple is only going to add to costs.
6.

Maintainability:- The product design should be such that maintaining it is simple and cost
effective in terms of repair or replacement of the defective part e.g. new automobile
tubeless tyres maintenance free inverter battery.

7.

Cost effective:- A products production cost gets determined at the designing stage. At the
designing stage, effective measures like standardization of parts and manufacturing process
and choice of input materials influence the cost of product.

Product Development Process:- The product development process consists of a series of activities
starting from idea generation and going up to commercial production.
(i)

Exploration:- This is the starting point where new ideas emerge from the sales force, which
is in direct contact with the customer. In addition, new idea may also be generated from
management, employees, shareholders, consultants or from study of foreign products and
markets, seminar papers, R & D laboratories, Govt. or university laboratories etc. example
google.

(ii)

Feasibility study:- At this stage, the new ideas generated are screened and the most
effective ones are finally selected. For scientific selection of the product, qualitative and
quantitative information needs to be consolidated keeping in new the organisations
objective and available facilities. All relevant technical and economic factors are analyzed at
this stage. Some of the questions considered before selecting an idea are:-

1.

What is the market potentiality of the idea?

2.

Is the idea technically feasible?

3.

Is the idea free from any intellectual property rights or patient regulations?

4.

What are the present and future raw material supply positions?

5.

To what extent are the existing production facilities and resource availability suitable to
commercialize the new ideas?

6.

What would be the amount of investment required and to what extent can the company
internally generate such as amount?

7.

Would there be adequate return on investment?

8.

If extent source need to be tapped has the cost of borrowings been taken into
consideration.

From environment
Consumer
Competitions
Suppliers

NEW PRODUCT
IDEAS

Market Research

FEASIBLITY
STUDY

IS PRODUCT
FEASIBLE?

From Company
R&D group
Engineering
Marketing

Technical Assessment

STOP

PRELIMINARY
PRODUCT DESGIN
PROCESS
PLANNING

Detailed
Engineering
PROTOTYPE
SAMPLE

MARKET TESTING

RAMP UP

COMMERCIALIZATION

(iii)

Detailed engineering phase- Upon approval a new product project graduates to the detailed
engineering phase. Primary activities constituting this phase are the design and construction
of working sample, also the development of tools and equipment critical to the products
commercial production. If the prototype fails to deliver the deserved performance results,
necessary changes in the products design are made by the engineers and the tests are
repeated.
Once this is done, the firm shifts the development of the product to the next phase, which is
pilot manufacturing phase. During this phase, the individual components that were build
and tested on production equipment are assembled. Post assembling, these are tested as
unitary system in the factory. During this phase only the units that comprise the product are
also produced. It is important that during this stage all tools and equipment are in order and
all units that supply parts are ready for volume production. This point in the products
development brings the entire system together be it the design, engineering parts,
production supervisors, tools and equipments, assembly sequence or the operators and the
technicians.

(iv)

Ramp up- The last phase of development where commercial production begins, is called
ramp-up. However volume of production increase, only when the organization develops the
confidence in its (and its suppliers) ability to execute consistent production as also the
ability of the marketing department to sell the product.

(v)

Commercialization:- This is the final stage of new product planning and it consists of
important decisions about whether to make or buy the products component parts and
activities such as developing production methods, activating distribution network,
integrating the new product with the organizations normal activity and finally achieving the
satisfactory sales volume and profitability.

Service Design: services vary on the amount of customer contact and in the intensiveness of labour
versus capital. Service technologies vary accordingly.
Customer contact:- Customer contacts occurs in 2 ways
First is the customers involvement in designing or customizing the service. In building a new home for
example, the customer can be intensively active on the design, working closely with an architect or the

customer can opt for a standard design without any customizing. The other examples is
providing a standard coffee and tea from a coffee vending machine or a customer can choose from over
20 different verities of coffee and tea in a CCD outlet.
A second way customer contact occurs is in creating the services. Hair styling for example, is a high
contact process because the customer participates in creating the service. Wig and toupee repair is
often a low contact process.
We can use the degree of customer contact to classify and evaluate service organization and to
understand how they operate. By categorizing service continuum ranging from low to high contact, we
can better appreciate the tradeoffs between flexibility and efficiency of operations. Generally high
contact process technology is more flexible to accommodate the unique needs of diverse customer.
When flexibility is high, efficiency is low because the conversion process cannot be standardized. At the
low contact end of the continuum, the process technology can be less flexible because customer are
absent during the conversion process and consequently the operations can be oriental more towards
standardization and efficiency.
Labour intensive: Some services, such as nursings and teaching are labour intensive, whereas others
such as 24 hours automatic teller machine are capital intensive. These different services obviously
present contrasting operating problems. While employee scheduling and training are dominant
concerns for a labour- intensive service company, technological advancement and capital investment
are dominant concerns for capital intensive service company.
Service process Mix:- Combining the two dimensions-customer contact and labour intensivenessproduces four distinctive types of services process technologies. Many service organisations fit clearly
into each cell of the matrix and they have different operation challenges and problems.
Quassi-Manufacturing (e.g. ATM Machine)- with low labour intensity and low customer contact, offers
rigidly standardized services, is very concerned with developing reliable delivery schedules and make
major capital equipment decision in a bureaucratized settings.
Mass Service (e.g city school system)- while still a system offering standardized services, are much more
involved with training, development and scheduling of the human resources so critical for successful
service delivery in this labour intensive conversion process.
Custom-shop service (e.g hospital) - must be capable of providing customized patient services with a
professional staff in a relatively capital-intensive conversion technologies that emphasize cost
containment and large capital investment decisions.

The hallmark of professional services (e.g tutoring) is customized service through intensive interaction
b/w the customer and professional personnel. Since the professionals are governed by norms than by
organizational rules. The professionals skills in relating to the customer are essential.
Low Customer contact

High customer contact

Quassi
manufacturing
Low cost airlines
Fast food Res.
ATM m/c

Service shop
Automobile garage
Large hospitals
Repair services

Mass service
Retailing
Education
Wholesale business

Professional service
Legal services
Beauty parlour
Personal taxation

Differences between Service Design and Product Design

1. Products are generally tangible; Services are generally intangible. Consequently service
design often focuses more on intangible factors (e.g. peace of mind, ambiance) than
does product design.
2. In many instances services are created and delivered at the same time (e.g. a haircut, a
car wash). In such instances there is less latitude in finding and correcting errors before
the customer has a chance to discover them.
3. Services cannot be inventoried. This poses restrictions on flexibility and makes capacity
issues very important.
4. Services are highly visible to customers and must be designed with that in mind; this
adds an extra dimension to process design, one that is usually not present in product
design.
5. Some services have low barriers to entry and exit. This places additional pressure on
service design to be innovative and cost effective.
6. Location is very important to service design, with convenience as a major factor. Hence
design of services and choice of location are often closely linked.
7. Service systems range from those with little or no customer contact to those that have a
very high degree of customer contact. For example

Software development Low customer contact

Automatic car wash - Low customer contact
Diet programme, Dance lessons High customer contact
Self-service in supermarket - High customer contact
Service design for systems that have little or no customer contact is very much like product
design; whereas service design with high customer contact generally requires inclusion of the
service delivery package.