6

Managing Design and New

Product Development
6.1 INTRODUCTION

Earlier chapters have shown how, throughout the world, all engineering and
technology-based companies face similar challenges:
 ever more demanding customers,
 rapid technological change,
 environmental issues
 competitive pressures on quality and cost
 shorter time to market with new product features

They operate against a background of common external factors:

 slow growth,
 excess capacity,
 increasing legislative control,
 demographic changes,
 market complexity and;
 increasing globalization of industries.

‘Three familiar forces explain why product development has become so

important. In the last two decades, intense international competition, rapid
technological advances and sophisticated, demanding customers have made
‘‘good enough’’ unsatisfactory in more and more consumer and industrial
markets’ [1].
6.2 THE DESIGN DILEMMA
 Management of quality, since many of the ‘design for’ objectives are
aspects of quality. The ‘design to’ objectives are among the corporate
objectives.
 The designers’ dilemma is the reconciliation of their own objectives with
those of the production engineering, production, distribution and support
activities.

Not shown in the figure are some other important business issues that need to be
considered as part of the management of design. These include time to market,
picking winning products, risk in new technology and the cost of new technology.
Many attempts to resolve the design dilemma, and to handle the major business
issues, founder when new product development is handled in a sequential way. If
design for manufacture and design for assembly, or design for ‘buildability’, are
tested by sequential trial and error, time is wasted and design work has to be
repeated.
  The concerns about feasibility and quality lead to design changes, which in
turn lead to process and facility changes. Evaluation of these changes may
not be fully completed when the time comes for engineering sign-off (ESO).
ESO is given in the hope that the product will be ‘good enough’. The
customer will probably decide that it is not, and this information comes back
to confirm the internal final test results. Sales fall below objectives.
 Living through one programme managed in this fashion is enough to
persuadeany intelligent engineer that there must be a better way. There is,
and it is called ‘simultaneous engineering’ (SE). It is also known as
‘concurrent engineering’.

There are others, which may be the root causes of the poor business
performance. The most important of these are:
• quality management;
• cost management;
• time management;
• customer requirements;
• the impact of new technologies.