Improving Engineering Design Designing for Competitive Advantage (1991) / Chapter Skim
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2 Designing for Competitive Advantage
2 Designing for Competitive Advantage
Pages 15-34
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From page 15... ...
Firms that utilize design most effectively were found to: commit to continuous improvement; · follow a product realization process tailored to their products;~5 · use a set of design practices chosen to implement their PRP; and foster a supportive design environment. CORPORATE COMMITMENT AND ACTION Though many U.S.
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From page 16... ...
Until they have faced competitors that use superior engineering design practices, companies rarely recognize the advantages to be gained by improving their own design practices. Thus, many companies begin to improve their design practices only after they have lost significant market share to competitors that made such improvements years ago.
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From page 17... ...
Designers must be made a part of the change team, and the engineering design methods introduced must be explained as part of an evolving whole rather than as a series of unrelated fads. Unless engineers are educated in the value, goals, and necessity of a change plan, they will continue to use demonstrably inferior design practices.
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From page 18... ...
Necessary training programs are begun. Product Design The product is designed by the members of the cross-functional teams, including suppliers of purchased components, whose differing objectives are expected to balance one another.20 The engineering effort aims at achieving a design that will exhibit little performance variation despite wide variation in the operating environment, product parameters, or even customer errors.2: 22 Simplification and standardization are applied to reduce the number and variety of parts and to make the product easily manufacturable.
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From page 19... ...
IMPORTANT CONTEMPORARY DESIGN PRACTICES If the product realization process is a firm's strategy for continuous improvement, design practices are its tactics. Most advanced engineering
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From page 20... ...
new practices to meet changing needs. The following sections describe design practices under the headings of Traditional Practices, Modern Practices for Setting Strategy and Specifications, and Modern Practices for Executing Designs.
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From page 21... ...
Topic B.2 in the research agenda discusses the research necessary to create these models, and topic B.1 discusses research that will make it possible to expand the use of computer simulations, rather than actual physical models, as prototypes. · Analytical models: Both conventional analytical models and correlational models derivedfrom design histories are powerful aids to engineering design arid continue to evolve.
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From page 22... ...
The die must be redesigned and tried out several times, a process that takes many months and lengthens the entire car design process. To reduce die tryout time, one auto company identified two key design parameters and studied their influence by plotting tryout tome for many previous designs.
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From page 23... ...
· Competitive benchmarking and quality function deployment. The most successful firms benchmark continuously not only their own product performance and features, design tools and techniques, technology, production approach, and facilities, but also those of their most successful competitors.
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From page 24... ...
This illustrates We ability of the metric to estimate the effects of both internal arid external events. design to profitability, track design improvement, or effectively compare different product and process designs, the R&D budget for design and process development is usually determined by applying an R&O-to-sales ratio "about right for this industry" or "about equal to what we think our best competitor spends." This situation results from the use of cost accounting systems, originally designed for other purposes, that provide only delayed and aggregated data perhaps based on labor or material costs,27 and from the fact that R&D costs, being charged when incurred, are not associated with any product or process.
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From page 25... ...
activity-based costing methods that associate engineering and marketing costs, as well as labor, materials, overhead, energy, and machine and process time, with individual products. In summary, new accounting methods make it possible to determine the contribution of product and process design to quality and profitability, to make intelligent allocations for R&D, and to determine explicitly the contribution of individual designers for purposes of recognition and compensation.
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From page 26... ...
industry, apart from electronics design, is surprisingly limited, and in even fewer cases is the output of the CAD system directly linked to computer-aided manufacturing systems or numerically controlled tools. A manager at one large automotive manufacturer estimated that only one-third of the company's designers used conventional CAD, and only a tiny fraction of those used three-dimensional solid modeling.
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From page 27... ...
Assembling a multidisciplinary design team permits pertinent knowledge to be brought to bear before individuals become wedded to their approach and much of the design cost has been invested. Differences are more easily reconciled early in design, and reductions in design cycle time that result from the use of this method invariably reduce total product cost.
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From page 28... ...
It calls for designers to examine all possible ways of eliminating quality loss in order to find the most economical one.36 Following this protocol,37 design commences with a systems design phase in which required features and function, including materials, parts, and tentative product parameter values, are selected. In the next phase, called parameter design, the designer systematically studies all parts to determine which do not significantly affect reliability or manufacturability.
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From page 29... ...
A formal, well-supported product realization process can make an important contribution to a productive design environment. In the following sections, we discuss briefly the nature of the design job and the designer, and some steps that can be taken to provide a supportive design environment.
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From page 30... ...
To derive information useful to the designer, these people must understand design. Those who do process design and systems integration must also have knowledge of the design process, as must the many engineers and scientists who work on CIM or the PRP.
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From page 31... ...
Documentation—Essential; match to user's needs; start early. Cultural change" If development or production of this product or process requires cultural change, its introduction will not be easy or swift.
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From page 32... ...
They suggested that the range of Out of designers is so great that it, like many other human attributes, is best expressed on a logantl~mic scale. Finding, Supporting, and Rewarding Effective Designers Some committee members and some people in the firms visited believe that the most effective designers have, in addition to analytical ability, the same sort of strong "right brain" skills as artists and poets—that it is this sort of associative skill that lets them come up with ingenious solutions.
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From page 33... ...
A full treatment of this subject is given in a 1988 NAE report.49 Finally, adoption of new management accounting methods, such as activity-based costing, can help designers improve designs of products and processes, and help to insure that designers' contributions are adequately recognized. Elements of a Supportive Design Environment The following elements, found in companies that utilize design effectively, contribute to designer efficiency and productivity.
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From page 34... ...
This done, industry must take the initiative in learning about and adopting appropriate best engineering practices, undertaking and collaborating with universities on relevant design-related research, and encouraging the academic sector to rethink undergraduate and graduate design education. Companies must review contemporary design practices in light of their product realization processes (or lack thereof)
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