Product and Service Design

Product and Service Design

• This aims to satisfy customers while maintaining reasonable profit margins.
• It involves redesigning existing products or services.
• Aligns with the organisation's overall strategy.
• The core of any business relies on products or services
• Everything from structure to operation and supply chain works together to effectively deliver products and services
• A well-designed product meets strategic goals like profitability, market leadership, and customer loyalty.
• Good design improves quality, reduces costs, speeds up delivery, and enhances customer satisfaction.
• Poor design leads to failures, recalls, legal issues, and reputational damage.
• It's important to carefully plan and integrate product and service design into the business' overall plans.

Functions of Product and Service Design

• Meeting customer needs by understanding their desired features.
• Refining existing products or services to elevate and sustain quality.
• Innovating by creating new, competitive products or services.
• Setting quality standards to meet defined customer expectations.
• Planning budgets to ensure affordability and balance profitability.
• Early testing of product versions to detect and resolve issues.
• Creating detailed guidelines for how a product should be manufactured.
• Defining efficient processes for production of goods and services.
• Businesses adapt to market changes by designing or redesigning goods

Factors Influencing Design Changes

• Economic Factors: include reduced demand, high warranty claims, or requirements for cost-cutting.
• Social/Demographic Shifts: consider aging populations or changing segments within consumer groups.
• Political/Legal Factors: address new laws, safety concerns, and government policies.
• Competitive Pressures: address new products and marketing strategies from rival companies.
• Cost/Availability Concerns: acknowledge fluctuations in raw materials, labor, or energy supply.
• Technological Advances: factor improved product features or methods in production.

Design for Manufacturing (DFM)

• DFM involves considering manufacturing capabilities during product design.
• Key questions to address in DFM include:
  • Is there market demand for this product?
  • Can we manufacture it efficiently?
  • What level of quality is appropriate?
  • Does it make financial sense from a production standpoint?

Manufacturability

• This refers to an organization's capability to produce items at an acceptable profit.
• It focuses on the ease of production and assembly:
  • Cost: Easier production reduces operational expenses.
  • Productivity: Streamlined designs boost manufacturing speed.
  • Quality: Products with good design tend to have fewer defects.
• Serviceability is the ability to provide a service at an acceptable cost or profit.

Design for Operations

• This is a broader term than DFM that includes product and service design
• Overlooking the details can:
  • Reduce productivity.
  • Lower overall quality.
  • Increase operational costs

The Design Process

• Motivation: Achieves goals of organization
• Designs align with company objectives and product/process applications, react to competitive and customer needs and new technologies
• Customer input is the primary driver for product and service design.

Sources for New Ideas

• Marketing: Uses insights from focus groups, surveys, and analyses of buying patterns.
• Competitors: Uses reverse engineering and closely studies rival products. This involves dismantling and analysing competitor products.
• Capabilities: Manages production needs, equipment, skills, materials, schedules and tech, and management must plan any changes.
• Forecast: Involves predicting future demand and market trends

Regulations and Legal Considerations

• Liabilities: Manufacturers are accountable for injuries or damages caused by product defects
• Uniform Commercial Code: Products comply with standards of merchantability and fitness. They must be safe, work as expected, and fit their intended use.

Ethical Considerations

• Address human factors by ensuring products are safe and easy to use.
• Consider cultural factors to meet local preferences across global markets. Global teams improve product design.
• Balance environmental factors by implementing reduce, reuse, and recycle where possible.
• Value analysis seeks to examine components to reduce costs and improve performance.
• Remanufacturing refurbishes old products, cutting waste and costs.

Environmental Factors

• Design for disassembly helps in easier part separation for recycling or reuse.
• Recycle recovers materials for future use and complies with environmental protection.
• Design for recycling design enables easy recovery of materials from used items.

Cradle-to-Grave Assessment

• This measures a product's environmental impact throughout its life. This helps determine the least environmentally damaging services taking into account economic factors
• End-of-life programs manage products that have completed their useful life.

Research and Development (R&D)

• R&D consists of activities to enhance knowledge and product innovation:
  • Basic Research: Progresses subject knowledge without immediate commercial use
  • Applied Research: Focuses on practical business applications for commercial applications.
  • Development: Turns research into marketable products

Standardization

• Standardization minimizes product variety and ensures availability.
• Mass customization involves customizing standardized goods with a degree of flexibility for the customer.
• Delayed differentiation involves starting a product witholding completion until customer preference input is received

Modular Design

• This involves easily interchangeable component parts as modules by designing separate, interchangeable parts for customization and easy upgrades. Benefits include:
• Easier failures/remedies, repair and assembly
• Easier repair and replacement
• Simplified manufacturing and assembly

Advantages of Standardization

• Fewer parts to manage in inventory and manufacturing
• Lower design costs
• Reduces time and cost for training
• Fulfullable orders from inventory
• Routine Purchasing
• Consistent quality
• Automation opportunities

Disadvantages of Standardization

• Freezes design keeping imperfections
• High cost of changes discourages improvements
• Reduces consumer appeal

Realibilty and Failure

• Reliability ensures products performs under specific conditions.
• Failure occurs when a product does not perform as designed.
• Normal operating conditions refers to standard conditions for reliability

Product Life Cycle Stages

• Introduction/Incubation: Product has low adoption and high performance with technology
• Growth: More customers use product, demand is high, and companies enhance designs
• Maturity: Wide availability of the product from multiple suppliers, high competition.
• Saturation: Market growth slows as most have already bought, few designs introduced
• Decline: Demand and suppliers decrease

Robust Design

• Ensures adaptability of products/services over a broad range of conditions
• Taguchi's Approach: It is easier to design a product insensitive to environmental factors than control these factors
• Central feature is Parameter Design.

Concurrent Engineering

• This is the integration of engineering design and production personnel early in the designphase.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

• Utilizes product design with graphics which increases designer prodctictivity and creates a database for manufacturing info/cost anlysis

Service Design

• Service Definition: Something is done to or for a customer.
• Service Delivery involves facilities, processes, and required skills.
• Product Bundle combines goods and services for customer value.
• Service Package includes resources, goods consumed and services to directly benefit customer.

Differences Between Product and Service Design

• Tangibility: Products are tangible while services aren't
• Timing: Services are created and delivered simultaneously.
• Inventory: Services cannot be stored.
• Visibility: Services depend on customer interaction
• Location: Location important to service
• Range: System service varies amongst each other.

Design Guidelines

• Theme: Focuses on main goals like convenience or speed.
• Demand: System variability ensures adaptability.
• Reliability and quality: Include checks and designs.
• Accessibility: System must be user-friendly.

Service Blueprinting

• A method to describe and analyize services based on their deliverance

Steps in Service Blueprinting

• Establish process boundaries and level of necessary detail.
• Identify individual steps and give descriptions.
• Prepare a flowchart.
• Identify possible failure points.
• Determine timeframes and variations.
• Analyze overall profitability.
• QFD integrates customer "voice" to ensure quality and needs preferences.

Forecasting Overview

• Forecasting predicts potential future outcomes using historical information, insights, and data.
• Operations Management prefers proactive approaches using structured activity
• An effective forecast clearly states future expectations which help with weather forecasting.

Forecast Use Cases

• Planning the system: Includes long-term planning about product and service types, facilities and equipments.
• Planning the use of the system: Short-term planning that involves workflow, inventory workforce and finances.

• Forecasts are important for financial planning, workforce management, marketing strategies, and production scheduling.
• All forecasting systems use same patterns of the past.

Elements Common to All Forecasts

• Assuming the same underlying causal patterns will persist from the past into the future. This assumes a casual system that resembles the past.

Key Forecasting Principles

• Forecasts are not perfect because there is presence of randomness.
• Forecasts based on groups are more accurate than individual forecasts due to canceling effects
• Accuracy declines as time horizon increases
• Timely information, must be accurate
• Reliable & Consistent
• Should include appropriate units.

Steps in the Forecasting Process

• Determine the purpose of the forecast and estimate if assumptions are met.
• Establish the forecast time horizon noting accuracy decreases with time.
• Select an effective forecasting techinuqe
• Gather and analyze applicable data
• Create a baseline with an appropriate, monitor and revis forecast if its off track.

Types of Forecasting

• Qualitative: Includes subjective inputs that defy accurate desciption.
• Quantitative: Uses existing data and causality.
• Jugdemental: Subject analysis regarding subjective material. In other words, a customer's expert opinion on products, that provides insights not elsewhere available
• Time series: Objective analysis depicting data that show a certain appearance that is projected in the future.

Associative Models

• This uses historical data in a relational format (easily or advanced) to develop quantitative/qualitative estimates. Explanatory variables predict future demand
• Changes may occur from Federal Reserve Board's interest rate and energy which leads to pricing.

Forecasts Based on Judgement and Opinion

• Uses subjective material to forecast based on information, knowledge, and history. Can be hard to quantify

Forecasts Based on Time Series (Historical) Data

• Time and sequence of observing data points over increments. Relationships exist between the predictor and prediction for linear regression. We believe patterns repeat leading to better decision making
• Behavior relies on series and shifts, leading to economic decisions.

Forecast Components

• Trend: Involves long-term upward or downward movement in data.
• Cycles: These are variable economic factors over a sustained period. Irregular: Unusual conditions in the data.
• Random Effects: Changes in the data that don't follow predictable patterns.

Core Principles

• Historical data shows randomness and noise
• The goal is to minimize effects by analyzing variations for accuracy while balancing cost and benefit

Choosing a Forecasting Technique

• Involves a large dataset that is properly sampled