1) The document discusses the importance of developing a clear mission statement and asking technical questions to focus product design efforts. It provides examples of a mission statement and technical questions for designing a fingernail clipper.
2) It also covers topics like developing a business case analysis, using technology forecasting to understand product life cycles, identifying customer needs, using quality function deployment (QFD) to prioritize engineering characteristics, creating a product design specification (PDS), and understanding market segmentation.
3) The document provides information to guide a new product development process, from initially defining goals and requirements through technical development and understanding markets.
1. Unit no-2 Product development: Technical and business concerns
Missionstatementand technical questioning:
A mission statement and technical clarification of the task are important first step in product
design process. They are intended to focus design efforts, define goals, translate the business
case analysis to the development team, and provides guidelines for the design process that
will prevent conflicts within design team and concurrent engineering organization.
Mission statement: Fingernail clipper product
ProductDescription:Remove andfileexcessfingernail length
KeybusinessorHumanitariangoal:30% Profitmargin,5% marketshare initially
PrimaryMarkets:Adultsof all ages
Secondarymarkets:Knife collectors,Businessexecutives
Assumptions:Small,compactstorage volume andlonglife (10years)
Stakeholders:XXXcorporation,users,salons,retailers
Avenuesof creative design:Ergonomicshape: store/captureof nails. Compactstorage
Scope/limitations: Materials:Steelprocessingandmoldableplastic
2. Technical questioning for the fingernail clipper example
Technical questions force the design team to think critically ,to first restate a design task in a
more precise way for the project or subset currently under consideration. Posting them helps
establish what to do next
1)What is the problem really about?-
2)What implicit expectations and desire are involved?-
3)Are the stated customer needs functional requirements and constraints truly appropriate?
4)What avenues are open for creative design?
5)What avenues are not open?
6)What characteristics must the product have?
7) What characteristics the product must not have?
8)What aspects of the design task can and should be quantified now?
9)Do any biases exists with the chosen task statement or terminology?
10)What are the technical and technological conflicts inherent in design task?
Business case analysis:
While completing an analysis of the market viability of a development project ,initially a
project manager must weigh the cost of development versus the expected future revenues.
Expected future revenues must compensate for development investment made today .Two
fundamental considerations therefore are risk and time value of money. During any product
design effort, a product’s market must be clarified through development of business case
analysis The Harvard Business case analysis method is financial assessment technique is
advanced method which has major process step like
1)Problem statement formation
2)Assumptions
3)Find major factors
4)Find minor factors
5)Find Alternatives
6)Discuss the alternatives
7)Recommendation
8)Implementation of recommended idea
3. Technology forecasting and S curve:
A product life cycle is usually depicted as diagram given which has four major phases
Of introduction, growth, maturity and decline
The development of a new technology follows an S-shaped growth curve
several other good ideas possible, and the rate of progress becomes exponential as
indicated by a steep rise in performance that creates the lower steeply rising curve
of the S. During this period a single individual or a small group of individuals can
have a pronounced effect on the direction of the technology. Gradually the growth
becomes more nearly linear when the fundamental ideas are in place, and technical
progress is concerned with filling in the gaps between the key ideas. This is the period
when commercial exploitation flourishes. Specific designs, market applications, and
4. manufacturing occur rapidly in a field that has not yet settled down. Smaller entrepreneurial
firms can have a large impact and capture a dominant share of the market.
However, with time the technology begins to run dry, and improvements come with
greater difficulty. Now the market tends to become stabilized, manufacturing methods
become fixed in place, and more capital is expended to reduce the cost of manufacturing.
The business becomes capital-intensive; the emphasis is on production know-how
and financial expertise rather than scientific and technological expertise. The maturing
technology grows slowly, and it approaches a limit asymptotically. The limit may
be set by a social consideration, such as the fact that the legal speed of automobiles
is set by safety and fuel economy considerations, or it may be a true technological
limit, such as the fact that the speed of sound defines an upper limit for the speed of a
propeller-driven aircraft
The success of a technology-based company lies in recognizing when the core
technology on which the company’s products are based is beginning to mature and,
through an active R&D program, transferring to another technology growth curve
that offers greater possibilities . To do so, the company must manage across
a technological discontinuity (the gap between the two S-curves in Fig. ), and a
new technology must replace the existing one ( technology insertion ). Past examples
of technological discontinuity are the change from vacuum tubes to transistors and
from the three- to the two-piece metal can. Changing from one technology to another
may be difficult because it requires different kinds of technical skills, as in the change
from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Technology usually begins to mature before profits top out, so there is often is a management
reluctance to switch to a new technology, with its associated costs and risks, when business is
doing so well. Farsighted companies are always on the lookout for the possibility for
technology insertion because it can give them a big advantage over the competition
5. Customer needs and customer satisfaction:
“Identification of customer needs” The goal of this activity is to completely understand the
customers’ needs and to communicate them to the design team. In a large company, the
research on customer needs for a particular product or for the development of a new product
is done using a number of formal methods and by different business units. The initial work
may be done by a marketing department specialist or a team made up of marketing and
design professionals.
Basic customers are of types:
1) Physiological needs
2) Safety and security needs
3) Social needs
4) Psychological needs
5) Self-fulfillment needs
Tools for Gathering Information from Customers about needs
1) Interviews with customers
2) Focus groups
3) Customer complaints
4) Warranty data
5) Customer surveys
Information gathered from customers and research on products from market literature
and experimentation contributes to creating a ranked listing of customer needs and
wants. These are the needs that form the end user’s opinion about the quality of a
product. As odd as it may seem, customers may not express all their requirements of
a product when they are interviewed. If a feature has become standard on a product
(e.g., a remote control on a TV) it is still a need but no longer excites the end users,
and they may forget to mention it.
Classifying Customer Requirements(CR)
A Kano diagram is a good tool to visually partition customer requirements
into categories that will allow for their prioritization
Kano recognized that there are four levels of customer requirements: (1) expecters
(2) spoken, (3) unspoken, and (4) exciters
1)Expecters: These are the basic attributes that one would expect to see in the
product,
i.e., standard features. Expecters are frequently easy to measure and are used
often in benchmarking
2) Spokens: These are the specific features that customers say they want in the
product. Because the customer defines the product in terms of these attributes, the
designer must be willing to provide them to satisfy the customer
3) Unspokens: These are product attributes the customer does not generally talk
about,
but they remain important to him or her. They cannot be ignored. They may be
attributes the customer simply forgot to mention or was unwilling to talk about or
simply does not realize he or she wants. It takes great skill on the part of the design
6. team to identify the unspoken requirements.
4) Exciters: Often called delighters, these are product features that make the product
unique and distinguish it from the competition. Note that the absence of an exciter
will not make customers unhappy, since they do not know what is missing
A Kano diagram or Kano model depicts how expected customer satisfaction
(shown on y-axis)
can vary with the success of the execution (shown on x-axis) for customer
requirements. The success of execution can also be interpreted as product
performance. The adequate level of performance is at the zero point on the x-axis.
Performance to the right of the y-axis indicates higher quality than required.
Performance to the left represents decreasing quality to the point where there is no
performance on a requirement
Curve 1: on Figure begins in the region of existing but less than adequately implemented
Performance and rises asymptotically to the positive x-axis. Curve 1 will never contribute to
positive customer satisfaction. Improving product performance beyond a basic level that
contributes to satisfying these CRs will not improve customer perceptions of the quality of
the product. However, failing to meet the expected performance will disproportionately
decrease quality perceptions Expecter CRs follow Curve 1. Unspoken CRs that are so
expected that customers think they don’t have to mention them will also follow Curve 1.
Curve 3:Any product performance that helps to satisfy these CRs will increase the
customer’s impression of quality. The improvement in quality rating will increase
dramatically as product performance increases. These are the CRs in the Exciter category.
7. Quality function deployment(QFD)
It is a process devised to identify the voice of the customer and channel it through the entire
product development process. The most popular step of QFD, producing the House of
Quality
Step-I Build house of quality
8. House of Quality summarizes a great deal of information in a single diagram. The
determination of the “Whats” in Room 1 drives the HOQ analysis. The results of the HOQ,
target values for “Hows” in Room 8, drives the design team forward into the concept
evaluation and selection processes.Thus, the HOQ will become one of the most important
reference documents created during the design process. Like most design documents, the
QFD should be updated as more information is developed about the design
Room 1: Customer requirements are listed by rows in Room 1.
Room 2: Engineering characteristics are listed by columns in Room 2.
Room 4: The relationship matrix is at the center of an HOQ. It is created by the
intersection of the rows of CRs with the columns of ECs(Engineering Characteristics)
Room 5: Importance Ranking of ECs. The main contribution of the HOQ is to determine
which ECs are of critical importance to satisfying the CRs listed in Room 1
The HOQ’s Relationship Matrix (Room 4) must be reviewed to determine the sets of ECs and
CRs before accepting the EC Importance rankings of Room 5
Interpretations from House of Quality(HOQ)
The HOQ helps to identify the engineering characteristics that are the most important
to fulfi lling the CTQ CRs (Critical to Quality Customer requirements) . In other words, the
HOQ aids in translating the CRs into critical to quality ECs.The highest-ranking ECs from
the HOQ are either constraints or design variables whose values can be used as decision-
making criteria for evaluating candidate designs. If a high-ranking EC has only a few possible
candidate values then it may be appropriate to treat that EC as a constraint
Thus, your highest-ranking ECs may become your design selection criteria. The results from
the HOQ act as a guide to assist the team in determining the relative weight that each EC
should have in evaluating designs.
The lowest-ranking ECs of the HOQ are not as critical to the success of the design.
These ECs allow freedom during the design process because their values can
be set according to priorities of the designer or approving authority They can be set in such a
way as to reduce cost or to preserve some other objective of the design team
Step-II Product design specification
The goal of design process planning is to identify, search, and assemble enough information
to decide whether the product development venture is a good investment for
the company, and to decide what time to market and level of resources are required
In the product development process, the results of the design planning process
that governs the engineering design tasks are compiled in the form of a set of product
design specifications (PDS).The PDS is the basic control and reference document for the
design and manufacture of the product. The PDS is a document that contains all of the facts
related to the outcome of the product development. It should avoid forcing the design
direction toward a particular concept and predicting the outcome, but it should also contain
the realistic constraints that are relevant to the design.
Creating the PDS finalizes the process of establishing the customer needs and wants,
prioritizing them, and beginning to cast them into a technical framework so that design
concepts can be established. The process of group thinking and prioritizing that developed the
HOQ provides excellent input for writing the PDS
9. Market segmentation
It is the Consumer who are Segmented, Not Product, nor Price It would be useful to provide
one important clarification right at the beginning. Markets, sometime, speaks of product
segments and price segments and use these expressions as synonymous with market
segments. This can leads to a wrong understanding of what market segments, or for that
matter, the process of market segmentation as a whole, actually connote We have to be clear
that in market segmentation, it is the consumers who are segmented, not the product, nor
price. Market is about people who consume the product, not about the product that’s gets
consumed
A market/ consumer population for a product can be segmented using several relevant bases.
The major ones include:
• Geographic
• Demographics
• Socio-cultural
• Psychographic
• Buying Behavior