Done By: Saleh Mohammed

1. How can an effective product design provide a competitive edge?

- matches product or service characteristics with customer requirements
- ensures that customer requirements are met in the simplest and least costly manner
- reduces time required to design a new product or service
- minimizes revisions necessary to make a design workable

2. What are the four outputs from a product design process?

▪ defines appearance of product
▪ sets standards for performance
▪ specifies which materials are to be used
▪ determines dimensions and tolerances

3. State four sources of ideas for new products (idea generation sources).
• Company’s own R&D department
• Customer complaints or suggestions
• Marketing research
• Suppliers
• Salespersons in the field
• Factory workers
• New technological developments
• Competitors

4. State three tools (not sources) that can be used for idea generation.
▪ Perceptual Maps: visual comparison of customer perceptions
▪ Benchmarking: comparing product or process against best-in-class
▪ Reverse engineering: dismantling competitor’s product to improve your own product

5. What is meant by benchmarking?

Benchmarking: comparing product or process against best-in-class
6. What is meant by reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering: dismantling competitor’s product to improve your own product

7. What should be included in a feasibility study (what does feasibility study consist of)? How it
is related to the design process?
• Market analysis: assesses whether there is enough demand for the proposed product to
invest in developing it further
• Economic analysis: When demand potential exists, they estimate of production and
developing costs
• Technical/strategic analyses
• Performance specifications: Written for product concepts that passes the feasibility
study and approved for development
➢ the feasibility study analyses the promising concepts identified by the first stage of design
process as mentioned above
 Done By: Saleh Mohammed

8. What is meant by rapid prototyping?

- Testing and revising a preliminary design model
9. Explain what is meant by form design.
- how product will look? Such as shape, color, size…
10. Explain what is meant by functional design.
- how product will perform? It includes reliability, maintainability, usability

11. Explain what is meant by production design.

- How the product will be made. Simplification, Standardization, Modular Design, Design for
Manufacture (DFM).

12. Differentiate between functional design and production design.

- functional design: how product will perform? It includes reliability, maintainability, usability.
- production design: How the product will be made. Simplification, Standardization, Modular
Design, Design for Manufacture (DFM).
13. Differentiate between system reliability and availability.
- reliability: he probability that a product will perform its intended function for a specified
period of time.
- availability: the ratio between mean time between failure to the total time, which is indicator
of its maintainability.

14. Differentiate between system maintainability and system usability.

- system usability: Ease of use of a product or service, ease of learning, ease of remembering
how to use.
- system maintainability: refers to the ease and/or cost with which a product or service is
maintained or repaired.

15. Discuss the concept of sequential design. What are its disadvantages?

16. Discuss the concept of concurrent engineering. What are its advantages? How do you involve
concurrent design in group project?
➢ A new approach to design that involves simultaneous design of products and processes
by design teams

- Advantages:
Improves quality of early design decisions
Involves suppliers
Incorporates production process
Uses a price-minus system
Scheduling and management can be complex as tasks are done in parallel
Uses technology to aid design
➢ In a group project, students are responsible for completing an assigned portion of the
project. If the project is well designed with clear expectations, this division of labor will
work. If not, considerable rework will be required.
 Done By: Saleh Mohammed

17. Describe the objective of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA).
FMEA: a systematic method of analyzing product failures
The objective of FMEA is to anticipate failures and prevent them from occurring.

18. Describe the objective of fault tree analysis.

a visual method for analyzing interrelationships among Failures and suggest solution these
failure

19. Describe the objective of value analysis.

• helps eliminate unnecessary features and functions.
• Used by multifunctional design teams
• Determine the value of the functions
• Determine the cost of providing the functions
• Compute Value/Cost ratio
• Design team works to increase the ratio

20. How design for environment can be maintained?

▪ designing a product from material that can be recycled
▪ design from recycled material
▪ design for ease of repair
▪ minimize packaging
▪ minimize material and energy used during manufacture, consumption and disposal

21. What is meant by sustainability?

The ability to meet present needs without compromising those of future generation.

22. What is the purpose of quality function deployment (QFD)?

Translates voice of customer into technical design Requirements.

23. What is the benefit of quality function deployment (QFD)?

➢ Promotes better understanding of customer demands
➢ Promotes better understanding of design interactions
➢ Involves manufacturing in design process
➢ Provides documentation of design process

24. Identify three ways product reliability can be improved when considering functional design.
1. Simplifying product design.
2. Improving the reliability of individual components.
3. Add Redundant Components.
 Done By: Saleh Mohammed

25. Explain the dimension of the three houses of quality.

26. Explain the concept of robust design. Give an example of a robust product or service.
the design of a product or a service that can withstand variations in environmental and operating
conditions. It
yields a product or service designed to withstand variation, by choosing controllable variables
that react in a robust fashion to possible occurrences of uncontrollable factor

Example: a car is a robust product, the car should work in all environments, hot or cold and in all
different weather sunny, snowy, moisty...etc. also the car should work properly on both paved
(asphalted) and non-paved (non-asphalted) roads

27. Explain the Taguchi’s quality loss function.

• Quantifies customer preferences toward quality
• Emphasizes that customer preferences are strongly oriented toward consistently
• Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)

28. What kinds of analyses are conducted in a feasibility study for new products?

Same answer in question 7

29. Differentiate between performance specifications, design specifications, and manufacturing

specifications. Write sample specifications for a product or service of your choosing.

Performance specifications: tell how a product is to perform.

Design specifications: detail the measurements and standards to which a product is to be built so
that it meets performance specifications.
Manufacturing specifications: outline how the processes are supposed to operate in order to
produce the product to meet design specifications.
 Done By: Saleh Mohammed

30. How are reliability and maintainability related? Give an example for a product or service you
have experienced.

reliability: the probability that a product will perform its intended function for a specified period
of time.
system maintainability: refers to the ease and/or cost with which a product or service is
maintained or repaired.

➢ Maintainability and reliability are closely related. For example, if a product is cheap to
manufacture and priced so low that customers throw it away when it fails (such as
calculators, telephones, and watches), maintainability may be a most issue. Similarly, if a
product is so reliable that it rarely breaks down, then ease of repair may not be important.
On the other hand, it may be less costly to make a product easy to maintain than to increase
its reliability. And for some products, both reliability and maintainability are very
important (e.g., office machines, computers).

31. Explain how simplification and standardization can improve designs. How does modular design differ
from standardization?

➢ Simplification attempts to reduce the number of parts and assemblies in a design and make the
remaining parts compatible. Fewer parts and better fitting parts provide fewer chances for error in
manufacture and assembly.
➢ Standardization is using commonly available and interchangeable parts, resulting in higher
volume production and purchasing, lower investment in inventory, easier purchasing and material
handling, fewer quality inspections, and less difficulties in production.
➢ Modular design consists of combining standardized building blocks or “modules’’ in a variety of
ways to create unique finished products. Thus, even though the parts may be standardized, the
finished product is unique.

32. How can design teams improve the quality of design? Relate your experiences in working in
teams. What were the advantages and disadvantages?

Design teams can obtain input from a variety of sources before erroneous decisions are made.
There is often a synergistic effect of people working together. Studies have found that the key to
a good design is the involvement and interaction of the “create, make, and market’’ functions from
the beginning of the design project. That said, working in teams can be difficult. It is usually easier
and less conflicting to work solo. Team members must be convinced that their joint effort will
produce better results than individual efforts.
 Done By: Saleh Mohammed

33. What does design for manufacture entail? List several techniques that can facilitate the DFM
process.

➢ design for manufacture (DFM): is the process of designing a product so that it can be
produced easily and economically. It identifies product design characteristics that are
inherently easy to manufacture, focuses on the design of component parts that are easy to
fabricate and assemble.
➢ Techniques for DFM include:
- design for assembly (DFA)
- failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA)
- fault tree analysis (FTA)
- value analysis (VA).

34. How does CAD relate to CAE and CAM? How do CAD and the Internet promote
collaborative design?

CAD: Computer Aided Design

CAE: Computer Aided Engineering

CAD has been especially useful in testing designs (CAE) and as a means of integrating design and
manufacture (CAD/CAM). Technology has enabled us to design new products more quickly,
consider many more alternatives than would be possible manually, test the design on a computer
screen without building a prototype, document the design in different forms, and automatically
transfer the design to manufacturing. Design centers or team members can be located in diverse
geographic locations and still communicate freely. Experts can collaborate on designs and make
changes from a distance via the Internet.