Product Design and its effect on Manufacturability and Environmental Responsibility
Time has changed in today’s business world and monopoly is rarely existent. Almost every line of business has a rival product and creativity in production and marketing has become inevitable. Businesses now employ different strategies and techniques to maintain existence. One way is the product design. It is defined as the activities undertaken while creating a product including the shaping, appearance and materials used in combining the various components realize the product. According to Riley (1999-2011), the aspects that should be considered in designing a product are discussed below.
System level design – the design team focuses on the main idea of the product and come up with a development plan. The center of focus is the customer needs, tastes and preferences. Competitive products are also considered, their strengths and weaknesses are evaluated because of the need for the new product to be better than the ones already in the market. In this stage, the product is nothing more than just a superior idea in the mind.
Detail design- in this stage, manufacturers and engineers come up with viable prototypes meeting the product provisions. The best prototype representing actual visualization of intended product is selected for testing. It helps in identifying manufacturing resources, their availability as well as showing necessary upgrades and estimates of the overall development cost.
Testing and refinement- the prototypes ability to meet customer needs and satisfaction is tested by a selected group of possible users. The feedback is then used to improve the product and undesired qualities eliminated or minimized as much as possible. The product is then retested and if found fit, mass production is affected. However, this is only possible after determining that the product is environmental friendly. Obtaining the raw materials should not deplete the environment of its resources. There should be a safe way of disposing or recycling the waste products resulting from use or manufacturing of the product.
Methodology of constructing and using control charts
Control chats are very effective in experimentally testing effectiveness of two different versions of a design Burk (2006). They are used to check whether a certain process is performing as intended and any anomaly is considered out of control. Construction involves designing X and Y axes with additional three lines that have been calculated and are parallel to the X-axis. The center line is considered the average. The line above it is the upper control limit and the one below is the lower control limit. Next step is to make time series plots then one simply compares the plots to the control limits to detect occurrence of any significant statistical effect. Any points lying above the upper control limits or below the lower control limit is an indication of significant effect and is considered out of control. Focusing on a manufacturing process, the effects may be as a result of external forces such as increase in pressure or temperature on the process. It can also be caused by excessive use of a certain manufacturing product or lowered use of the product. Such occurrences normally result to undesired final product and thus immediate measures should be taken the moment they are detected to bring the process under control. Generally, out of control indicators come about when one or more of the manufacturing procedures is violated.
References.
Burk S. (2006). A better statistical method for A/B Testing in Mrketing campaigns. Retrieved from http://marketing-bulletin.massey.ac.nz/V17/MB_V17_T3_Burk.pdf
Solentive (2010). Product design & development. Retrieved from http://www.rqriley.com/pro-dev.htm
