New Product Design

A structured approach to developping successful products

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Concurrent Engineering
The concurrent engineering design process was developed to ameliorate the
problems associated with the over the wall design process. You can learn about the
over-the-wall design process by clicking here. In short the over-the-wall design
process consisted of different departments in a company working on designs in
isloation and then Throwing the project over the wall to the next department. The
complaints about the over-the-wall design systems are discussed below.
The products took too long to get to the market.
Because many products has to be sent back to previous departments for rework,
the length of time for a product to get through the system to market was long.
Often competitive products would be the first on the market and take the majority
of the profits.
The products produced by the over-the-wall method cost too much.
The root cause of this problem could be traced back to the fact that manufacturing
engineers were not consulted about the design until the design engineers had
finished the design. Often the manufacturing engineers requests for design
changes to make the design easier and cheaper caused delays while the design
engineers considered the impact of the requested design changes. Figure one
shows that early design decisions have much greater impact on the final cost of a
product than do decisions made later in the design process. For instance a car
manufacturers decision about what type of drive train to use is made early in the
design process and has a huge impact on the cost of a car. Should the car be
powered by a gas engine, diesel engine, electric motor, a hybrid system or a fuel
cell? Whereas, the plastic slected to manufacture an interior trim piece has a much
more limited impact on the cost of a car and is made much later in the design
process. You can read a funny story about design for manufacture by clicking here.

Figure 1. The cost impact of making a design decision as a function of the stage in
the deisgn process.
The products did not meet the needs of the customers.
After marketing had identified the need and passed it to the research engineers to
investigate the possible technologies, the marketing people were not consulted.
Often the needs of the customer were lost in the process and the back and forth
between the departments. Therefore the final product did not meet the needs of
the customer.

The Tenets of Concurrent Engineering

All Stakeholders represented on the design team. From the beginning of the
product development effort until the product goes to the customer all stakeholders
are represented on the design team. Example of stakeholders include;
Marketing
Sales
Finance
Research
Design
Manufacturing
Service
Suppliers of key components
Problems are identified and solved as early as possible in the design process.
Problems are easier and less expensive to solve early in the design process. For
example, a tolerance problem that is caught before any parts are made is much
easier and less expensive to fix than a tolerance problem that is found when parts
do not assemble correctly. In the first case a changing the tolerances on the
drawings of the parts involved may solve the problem. In the second case, the
solution requires not only a change to the drawings but also changes to tooling that
makes the parts involved and finally the parts on hand must be reworked or
scrapped. The costs add up fast! Click here to learn about a tragic tale of missed
opportunity.
Advantages of Concurrent Engineering
Shorter Time to Market. Figure 2. shows how the concurrent engineering strategy
shortens development time. Between 24 months and 18 months before the launch
of the product, shown as month zero on the horizontal axis, design teams using
concurrent engineering techniques made many more design changes than design
teams using over-the-wall techniques. However, the concurrent engineering teams
made far fewer design changes in the 12 months before the launch of the product
while the over-the-wall teams filed a huge number of changes in the 6 months
before and after the launch date.

Figure 2. The number of design changes made versus time.

Less Costly Product Development Projects. Figure 3. shows the product
development costs versus time for both the concurrent engineering strategy and
the over-the-wall strategy. Note the similarities to the trends seen in figure 2. In
the beginning the the concurrent engineering strategy costs more because of the
cost paying representatives of all of the stakeholders to participate on the design
team. The over-the-wall strategy is expensive near launch because many people
are added to the design team correct design issues that were not detected and
dealt with earlier in the process. Click here to read about Caterpillars problems
with over-the-wall design processes.

Figure 3. The product development cost versus time.

Concurrent engineering has become the standard method for product design in
most progressive companies. However, when management wanted to assert more
control over the projects and discontinue projects that were not going well, the
Stage Gate process was born.