Concurrent Product Design

uct’s life depends on its acceptance by the consumers; a “failed” product could be “pulled from the market shelves” in a matter of months. A short product development cycle is crucial as it enables the company to deliver new products to the market quickly. Insufficient information and communication between phases are two reasons for long development cycles. In a typical cycle, each phase receives information from the previous phase, and feedback from the next phase. For example, the marketing representative gathers a set of customer requirements about the product and passes the information to the designer. The designer generates several designs that meet those requirements and passes one of these designs to the manufacturing engineer. The first problem that arises from a traditional approach is the loss of abstract information as the product specification is passed down the chain. Each phase in the chain receives a more concrete and often more distorted interpretation of the product description from the previous phase. Consequently, the final product does not always meet the needs of the customer. The second problem is that much time and effort is spent on returning the design to earlier phases to correct design mistakes that are discovered “downstream.” This results in a long, costly development. The third problem is the loss of optimization opportunities. A product design is the interpretation of the functional requirements of the product in physical form. Theoretically, there are many physical interpretations. By finalizing a product design, the designer is choosing one interpretation, and passing it to the manufacturing engineer. This interpretation, the “best” from the designer’s point of view, may not be manufacturable. The designer may not know this because he or she does not have detailed manufacturing knowledge. The manufacturing engineer, on the other hand, has the knowledge to decide whether a design is manT product introductions. The duration of a prod-