The Design of Products

and Services
Why is good design so important

A good design
Satisfies Customers (Primary Objective)
Communicates the purpose of product or service to its markets
Brings financial rewards
Objectives of Product Designers
Product should perform well and is reliable during its lifetime
The designing and manufacturing of the product is easy and quick
Objectives of Service Designers
Try to put together a service which meets
Even exceeds the customer expectations
All these must be within the capabilities of the operation and be delivered
at reasonable cost.
What is designed in a product or
service

All products and services can be considered as having 3 aspects

Concept: The understanding of the nature, use and value of the service or product.
The core concept of any product or service like a concept car or a restaurant.

Package: A package of component products and services that provide those benefits
defined in the concept.
It speaks about the core products and services along with the supporting products and services.

Process: It defines the way in which the component products and services will be created
and delivered.
The actual process which is followed to produce the products or services.
 The stages of design

Concept Generation: it is the stage that develops the overall concept for the product or
service.
Screening: The concepts are then screened to try to ensure that, in broad terms, they will be
a sensible addition to its product/service portfolio and meet the concept as defined.
Preliminary Design: The agreed concept has then to be turned into a preliminary design.
Evaluation and Improvement: The preliminary design then goes through a stage of evaluation
and improvement to see if the concept can be served better, more cheaply or more easily.
Prototyping and final design: An agreed design may then be subjected to prototyping and
final design.
 Concept Generation

The ideas for new product or service can come from internal sources or any external sources.
1) Ideas from customers Focus Group
2) Listening to customers Reverse Engineering
3) Ideas from staff Service Staff or Sales Person
4) Ideas from Research and development
Open-sourcing using a development
community

The basic concept of open-source software is very simple.

Large communities of people around the world, who have the ability to
write the code, come together and produce a software product.
The finished is available to everyone for use at free and is also updated on
regular to keep a pace with necessary improvements.
Examples: Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, GSM Arena etc.,
 Concept Screening

Not all concepts which are generated will necessarily be capable of further development as they
need to pass through several design criteria.
1) The Feasibility of design option can we do it
a) Do we have the skills (quality of resources)
b) Do we have the organizational capacity (quantity of resources)
c) Do we have the financial resources to cope with this option
2) The acceptability of design option do we want to do it
a) Does the option satisfy the performance criteria which the design is trying to achieve
b) Will our customers want it
c) Does the option give a satisfactory financial return
3) The vulnerability of each design option do we want to take the risk
a) Do we understand the full consequences of adopting the option
b) Being pessimistic, what could go wrong if we adopt the option? What would be the consequences of
everything going wrong.
The Design Funnel
Preliminary Design

The objective of this stage is to

Specifying the concept products and services in the package
Defining the processes to create the package
Specify the components of the
package

The 1st task in this stage is to define

The constituent component parts
The component (or product) structure
The order in which the components are put together
The component structure of a remote
mouse
Reducing design complexity

The most elegant design solutions are often simplest.

The variety or range of products & services increases the complexity
factor.
The common approaches to complexity reduction
Standardization.
Commonality.
Modularization.
Standardization

It is a attempt used in operations to overcome the cost penalties of high

variety.
It is done for products, services or processes.
Often it is the operations output which is standardized.
Commonality

Using common elements within a product or service.

The more different products and services can be based on common
components, the less complex it is to produce them.
Modularization

The use of modular design principles involves designing standardized, sub-

components of a product or service which can be put together in
different ways.
Design Evaluation and Improvement

The purpose of this stage is to take the preliminary design and see if it can
be improved before the product / service is tested in the market.
The 3 proved techniques are
Quality function development (QFD)
Value engineering (VE)
Taguchi methods
Quality function development

The key purpose of QFD is the ensure that the design of a product or
service actually meets the needs of its customers.
This technique was developed in Japan at Mitsubishis kobe shipyard.
 Value Engineering

The purpose of value engineering is

Try to reduce cost
Prevent any unnecessary cost
Value engineering programmes are usually conducted by project teams consisting of
Designers
Purchasing specialists
Operations managers
Financial analysts
Value engineering requires innovative and critical thinking.
The procedure examines
The purpose
The primary functions
The secondary functions
Taguchi Methods

It was given by Genichi Taguchi.

The main purpose of this method is to test the robustness of a design.
The task is to achieve a design which can cope with all the uncertainties.
It also helps in achieving
The lowest cost
Highest degree of uniformity
 Prototyping and Final Design

Product prototypes include

Clay Models
Computer Simulations
Service prototypes include
Computer Simulations
Actual Implementation of the service on a pilot basis
Many retailing organizations pilot new products and services to test the reaction of
customers.
CAD is used to have a 3D design of the products before they are actually manufactured to
see the final design of the product with exact dimentions.