Salvador, Jomilyne S.

Sec-08/TF 1:30-3:00

1. What are some of the factors that cause organizations to redesign their products or
services?

- Organizations redesign their products and services for a variety of reasons. Among them
are customer dissatisfaction, government regulation, competition, liability claims,
technological innovation (products and methods), and changes in costs and availability of
such inputs as materials, labor, and energy.

2. Name some of the main advantages and disadvantages of standardization

- The main advantages of standardization are:

a. Less variety of parts to deal with.

b. Permits standardized training, purchasing, inspection, and material handling. It may also
permit automation.

c. Enables production to stock, which allows filling orders from inventory, and potentially
long production runs.

Among the main disadvantages of standardization are the following:

a. Designs may be "frozen" with too many imperfections remaining.

b. The high cost of design changes increases resistance to improvement.

c. Decreased variety may lessen consumer appeal.

3. What is modular design? What are its main advantages and disadvantages?

- Modular design refers to viewing a product (and sometimes a service) as being composed
of a number of "chunks" or sections instead of a collection of individual parts. In effect, it is
one form of standardization. Among the advantages of modular design are ease of diagnosis
and repair of failures; standardization of manufacturing;and more routine purchasing,
inventory control, and training. The disadvantages of modular design include a decrease in
possible variety of the product, the possibility of not being able to disassemble a module to
replace a faulty part, and possible resistance to design improvements, particularly minor
ones, if they cannot be readily incorporated into an existing configuration.
4. Explain the term design for manufacturing and briefly explain why it is important.

- Product designers must take into consideration the organization's manufacturing

capabilities to produce a particular product. Operations people should be involved early in
the design process to ensure that the design will be compatible with the organization's
capabilities. Production/ Operations people can provide the necessary input to make things
apparent before problems arise in production. Marketing people should also be involved to
ensure that customer requirements will be given proper consideration.

5. What are some of the competitive advantages of concurrent engineering?

- Some of the competitive advantages of concurrent engineering are:

a. Manufacturing personnel are able to identify production capabilities and capacities. Very
often, they have some latitude in design in terms of selecting suitable materials and
processes. Knowledge of production capabilities can help in the selection process. In
addition, cost and quality considerations can be influencedgreatly by design, and conflicts
during production can be reduced greatly.

b. Early opportunities for design or procurement of critical tooling, some of which might
have a long lead-time. This can result in a major shortening of the product development
process, which could be a key competitive advantage.

c. Early consideration of the technical feasibility of a particular design or a portion of a

design. Again, this can avoid serious problems during production.

d. More effective resource allocation.

e. The emphasis can be on problem resolution instead of conflict resolution.

6. Explain and give examples of the term remanufacturing.

- Remanufacturing involves removing some of the parts and components of old products
and reusing them in new products.

For example, an auto repair business can easily branch out and start offering
remanufactured goods as part of their services, or a small business that repairs office
machines will gain the necessary knowledge to remanufacture related products at the same
time as it conducts its normal business activities.
7. What is meant by the term life cycle? Why would this be a consideration in product or
service design?

- The term "life cycle" refers to a sequence of stages of demand that products or services go
through. A typical sequence consists of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Efforts
to improve design may depend on the stage of the life cycle: In the early stages, there is a
greater potential for returns than there is in later stages. Moreover, many design changes
can be anticipated early during the life cycle as familiarity with the product or service
increases.

8. What is mass customization? Give some examples

Mass customization is a strategy of producing standardized goods or services while

incorporating a certain degree of customization in the final product or service. Mass
customization can be achieved using a couple of different tactics. These tactics are delayed
differentiation and modular design.

Delayed differentiation involves postponing completion of the service or the product until
obtaining specific information about customer preferences and specifications. Once the
company has knowledge about specific customer preferences, the customized specifications
are incorporated on almost-completed units. This approach reduces product or service
delivery lead-times while reducing costs and improving the efficiency due to
standardization.

Mass customization can also be achieved through modular design. Modular design is a form
of product standardization in which components are classified into modules that are easily
replaced, interchanged, assembled, or disassembled.

Examples:

 Mass Production
 Mass Production + Customization
 Self-Service Design
 Bespoke
 Soft Customization
 Self Customization

9. Name two factors that could make service design much different from product design.

- Differences between service design and product design:

a. Products are generally tangible; services are generally intangible. Consequently, service
design often focuses more on intangible factors (e.g., peace of mind, ambiance) than does
product design.
b. Services are often produced and received at the same time (e.g. a haircut, a car wash).
Thus, there is less latitude in finding and correcting errors before the customer has a chance
to discover them. Consequently, training, process design, and customer relations are
particularly important.

c. Services cannot be inventoried. This poses restrictions on flexibility and makes capacity
design very important.

d. Services are highly visible to consumers and must be designed with that in mind; this adds
an extra dimension to process design, one that usually is not present in product design.

e. Some services have low barriers to entry and exit. This places additional burden on
service design to be innovative and cost-effective.

f. Location is often important to service design, with convenience as a major factor. Hence,
design of services and choice of location often are closely linked.

10. Explain the term robust design. Cite some examples of Taguchi methods used in
product and service designs.

- Robust design is a design that results in products or services that can function over a broad
range of conditions. The more robust a product is the less likely it will fail due to a change in
the environment in which it is used. The more designers can build robustness into the
product, the better it should hold up, resulting in a higher level of customer satisfaction. It
does not mean just making products heavier and bigger because these may not be
attributes customers desire in a product. They may want a robust design that is lighter and
compact.

Examples:

Design a robust product

Insensitive to environmental factors either in manufacturing or in use.

Central feature is Parameter Design.

Determines:

factors that are controllable and those not controllable

their optimal levels relative to major product advances