Mastering Product and Service Design: A Strategic Approach to Reliability

Strategic Product and Service Design: Aligning with Organizational Goals

Designing products and services is at the core of any successful organization. The process begins with understanding customer wants and needs, translating them into specific requirements, and then developing or refining products and services that meet these needs. This strategic approach not only involves setting quality goals and cost targets but also constructing and testing prototypes, documenting specifications, and ensuring that the entire organization collaborates across various functions like marketing, operations, and finance.

Key Questions in Product and Service Design

In the journey of product and service design, organizations must address some fundamental questions:

• Is there demand? Understanding market size and demand profile is crucial.
• Can we do it? This involves assessing manufacturability, serviceability, and the practicality of production at scale.
• What about quality? Quality must align with customer expectations and the organization’s brand identity.
• Economic sense? Products and services must be viable in terms of cost, profits, and aligning with the business model.

Drivers Behind Design and Redesign

Organizations may redesign or develop new products due to various forces:

• Market Opportunities or Threats: These could be economic, social, demographic, political, legal, or competitive in nature.
• Technological Advancements: New technologies often drive the need for new products.

Sources of New Product Ideas

Ideas for new products can come from various places within the supply chain:

• Customers, Suppliers, and Distributors: Direct feedback and suggestions.
• Employees and Maintenance Personnel: Insights into recurring issues and potential improvements.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

When designing products, ethical and legal considerations are paramount. Reverse engineering, while legal, poses ethical questions. Product liability, sustainability, and the Universal Commercial Code (UCC) are other legal aspects that must be considered.

Design Stages and Considerations

The lifecycle of a product or service includes introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. During these stages, considerations like standardization, mass customization, modular design, and robust design shape the development process. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Concurrent Engineering are methodologies that incorporate customer feedback and cross-functional collaboration into the design process.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

CAD increases designer productivity and provides a database of manufacturing information, allowing for engineering and cost analysis. This includes finite element analysis, which can simulate real-world conditions and interactions of product components.

Manufacturability and Service Design

The ability to reproduce or provide a service efficiently and cost-effectively is critical. In service design, strategies vary significantly, from Subway’s approach to customization to kiosk-based ordering systems like those found in Wawa or Sheetz gas stations.

Reliability in Design

Reliability is defined as the ability of a product, part, or system to perform under prescribed conditions. It’s expressed as a probability, with key rules such as the series rule and redundancy rule helping to calculate overall system reliability. The bathtub curve represents the reliability over time, highlighting the phases of infant mortality, normal operation, and wear-out.

Conclusion

Product and service design is a complex, strategic process that requires careful consideration of customer needs, market demands, technological capabilities, and ethical standards. By following best practices and leveraging modern design tools and methodologies, organizations can create reliable, high-quality products and services that meet or exceed customer expectations.

For a deeper dive into the intricacies of product and service design and reliability, watch the full lecture on YouTube.