Quality Design Engineering: The Missing Link in U.S. Competitiveness

Past efforts to understand why Japanese Corporations deliver products with superior appeal to customers have often tocused on the symptoms of what manufacturing delivers rather than the upstream Engineering Design fundamentals that determine what manufacturing can deliver. Detailed comparisons of Japanese and U.S. processes and practices utilizing Competitive Benchmarking concepts and techniques created by Xerox in the early 1980’s [1,2] identify Engineering Design as a major competitive factor. In this article, these Competitive Benchmarkinq processes are used to demonstrate that Engineering Design process capability is the “missing link” in efforts to achieve world class competitiveness in mechanically intense systems found in most home, office, military, aerospace and factory products. Competitive benchmarking is also used to identify Quality and Engineering Design practices that need to be implemented to improve U.S. competitiveness.