AXIOMATIC DESIGN BASED ANALYSIS OF ARTICLES ON UNMARKETABLE COMMODITIES

We picked out fifty “unmarketable commodities” that the market put down against their expected sales and analyzed them with Axiomatic Design. These commodities had been introduced by the Nikkei Business Daily as new products that failed to meet their sales expectations. Our analysis set the selling points to primary functional requirement FR1, and countermeasures against the constraints to FR2. The analysis categorized the failure events into three groups. Group (1) gathered events caused by poor product planning within the organizations. The group had 17 events, 9 of which were decoupled designs where design parameter DPi affected other FRj. Group (2) failures were caused by change in the circumstances outside the organization, and 8 out of the 14 events in the group blamed changes in the design range of FRi at the time of the initial product launches into the market. Group (3) events were due to poor alignment of the designer’s concept and the consumer’s needs. Small probabilities for aesthetic or cultural DPi to satisfy FRi caused 13 out of the 19 events in the group. Countermeasures to these failures, whatever the event and cause were, included changing the DP system range, FR design range, DP itself, FR itself, scaling down the project or abandoning it, in the order of magnitudes of impact to the projects.