Product Life Cycle Management (15ME835) 2019-2020

MODULE –II
PRODUCT DESIGN
Engineering design, organization and decomposition in product design, product design process,
methodical evolution in product design, concurrent engineering, design for ‘X’ and design central
development model. Strategies for recovery at end of life, recycling, human factors in product
design. Modelling and simulation in product

2.1 Engineering Design

The engineering design process is a common series of steps that engineers use in
creating functional products and processes. The process is highly iterative - parts of the
process often need to be repeated many times before another can be entered - though
the part(s) that get iterated and the number of such cycles in any given project may
vary.
It is a decision making process (often iterative) in which the basic sciences,
mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to
meet a stated objective. Among the fundamental elements of the design process are the
establishment of objectives and criteria, synthesis, analysis, construction, testing and
evaluation.

2.2 Common stages of the engineering design process

One framing of the engineering design process delineates the following
stages: research, conceptualization, feasibility assessment, establishing design
requirements, preliminary design, detailed design, production planning and tool design,
and production. Others, noting that "different authors (in both research literature and in
textbooks) define different phases of the design process with varying activities
occurring within them," have suggested more simplified/generalized models - such
as problem definition, conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design, and
design communication. A standard summary of the process in European engineering
design literature is that of clarification of the task, conceptual design, embodiment
design, detail design. In these examples, other key aspects - such as concept evaluation
and prototyping - are subsets and/or extensions of one or more of the listed steps. It's
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also important to understand that in these as well as other articulations of the process,
different terminology employed may have varying degrees of overlap, which affects
what steps get stated explicitly or deemed "high level" versus subordinate in any given
model.

Research
Various stages of the design process (and even earlier) can involve a significant
amount of time spent on locating information and research. Consideration should be
given to the existing applicable literature, problems and successes associated with
existing solutions, costs, and marketplace needs.
The source of information should be relevant. Reverse engineering can be an effective
technique if other solutions are available on the market. Other sources of information
include the Internet, local libraries, available government documents, personal
organizations, trade journals, vendor catalogs and individual experts available.

Design requirements
Establishing design requirements and conducting requirement analysis, sometimes
termed problem definition (or deemed a related activity), is one of the most important
elements in the design process, and this task is often performed at the same time as a
feasibility analysis. The design requirements control the design of the product or
process being developed, throughout the engineering design process. These include
basic things like the functions, attributes, and specifications - determined after
assessing user needs. Some design requirements include hardware and software
parameters, maintainability, availability, and testability.

Feasibility
In some cases, a feasibility study is carried out after which schedules, resource plans
and estimates for the next phase are developed. The feasibility study is an evaluation
and analysis of the potential of a proposed project to support the process of decision
making. It outlines and analyses alternatives or methods of achieving the desired
outcome. The feasibility study helps to narrow the scope of the project to identify the

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best scenario. A feasibility report is generated following which Post Feasibility Review
is performed.
The purpose of a feasibility assessment is to determine whether the engineer's project
can proceed into the design phase. This is based on two criteria: the project needs to be
based on an achievable idea, and it needs to be within cost constraints. It is important to
have engineers with experience and good judgment to be involved in this portion of the
feasibility study.

Concept Generation
A concept study (conceptualization, conceptual design) is often a phase of project
planning that includes producing ideas and taking into account the pros and cons of
implementing those ideas. This stage of a project is done to minimize the likelihood of
error, manage costs, assess risks, and evaluate the potential success of the intended
project. In any event, once an engineering issue or problem is defined, potential
solutions must be identified. These solutions can be found by using ideation, the mental
process by which ideas are generated. In fact, this step is often termed Ideation or
"Concept Generation." The following are widely used techniques:

• trigger word - a word or phrase associated with the issue at hand is stated, and
subsequent words and phrases are evoked.
• morphological analysis - independent design characteristics are listed in a chart,
and different engineering solutions are proposed for each solution. Normally, a
preliminary sketch and short report accompany the morphological chart.
• synectics - the engineer imagines him or herself as the item and asks, "What
would I do if I were the system?" This unconventional method of thinking may find
a solution to the problem at hand. The vital aspects of the conceptualization step are
synthesis. Synthesis is the process of taking the element of the concept and
arranging them in the proper way. Synthesis creative process is present in every
design.

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• brainstorming - this popular method involves thinking of different ideas,

typically as part of a small group, and adopting these ideas in some form as a
solution to the problem

Various generated ideas must then undergo a concept evaluation step, which utilizes
various tools to compare and contrast the relative strengths and weakness of possible
alternatives.

Preliminary design
The preliminary design, or high-level design includes (also called FEED or Basic
design), often bridges a gap between design conception and detailed design,
particularly in cases where the level of conceptualization achieved during ideation is
not sufficient for full evaluation. So in this task, the overall system configuration is
defined, and schematics, diagrams, and layouts of the project may provide early project
configuration. (This notably varies a lot by field, industry, and product.) During
detailed design and optimization, the parameters of the part being created will change,
but the preliminary design focuses on creating the general framework to build the
project on.
S. Blanchard and J. Fabrycky describe it as: “The ‘whats’ initiating conceptual design
produce ‘hows’ from the conceptual design evaluation effort applied to feasible
conceptual design concepts. Next, the ‘hows’ are taken into preliminary design through
the means of allocated requirements. There they become ‘whats’ and drive preliminary
design to address ‘hows’ at this lower level.”

Detailed design

Following FEED is the Detailed Design (Detailed Engineering) phase, which may
consist of procurement of materials as well. This phase further elaborates each aspect
of the project/product by complete description through solid modeling, drawings as
well as specifications.

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Design for manufacturability

Design for manufacturability (DFM) is the general engineering art of designing

products in such a way that they are easy to manufacture.

• Operating parameters
• Operating and nonoperating environmental stimuli
• Test requirements
• External dimensions
• Maintenance and testability provisions
• Materials requirements
• Reliability requirements
• External surface treatment
• Design life
• Packaging requirements
• External marking

Computer-aided design (CAD) programs have made detailed design phase more
efficient. For example, a CAD program can provide optimization to reduce volume
without hindering a part's quality. It can also calculate stress and displacement using
the finite element method to determine stresses throughout the part.

Production planning

The production planning and tool design consists of planning how to mass-produce the
product and which tools should be used in the manufacturing process. Tasks to
complete in this step include selecting materials, selection of the production processes,
determination of the sequence of operations, and selection of tools such as jigs,
fixtures, metal cutting and metal or plastics forming tools. This task also involves
additional prototype testing iterations to ensure the mass-produced version
meets qualification testing standards.

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2.2 Product Design Process

Introduction Product design takes a long time and a great deal of effort. It is important
to target the design programme to minimise time and costs and to plan for it to be
successfully completed within allocated resources. Time is very much of the essence,
the minimum compatible with optimal development. In a product design plan, there are
many activities to be first recognised and then coordinated; some activities are worked
in sequence, some in parallel. In particular, multidisciplinary activities are focused in
the same direction and coordinated in time. The master plan coordinates the various
people and their mini-projects in an overall time and resource plan so that the product
design can be controlled. The plan begins with the product design specifications. These
include a profile of the product characteristics as defined by the consumer, the structure
and composition, safety factors, convenience and aesthetics, and also indicates the
manufacturing, processing and storage variables and their effects on the product
qualities. Many of these product design specifications start as general descriptions;
product design and process development focuses them into definite, quantitative
descriptions. In the design process, the product and process development are integrated
so that at the end of the design stage there is a product with the optimum qualities, and
a process to produce it. A great deal of time is lost if a food product is designed under
'kitchen conditions' and then has to be redesigned as the process is developed. In food
product design: important marketing factors are consumer acceptability, competitive
positioning, legal regulations, ethical requirements, environmental mandates and
distributor requirements; important technical factors are raw material availability, ease
of processing, cost, attainability and reliability of product quality, shelf life, equipment
needs, human knowledge and skills; and important financial factors are costs of
manufacturing and distribution, costs of further development and the investment
needed. These are considered at various parts of the design so that at the end of the
product design and process development they can all be included in the feasibility
report for top management. 5.2 The design process The design activities are grouped
into steps: 'getting the feel', screening, ball-park studies, optimisation and scale-up of

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production and marketing, leading at the end to product and process specifications,
marketing strategy and financial analysis as shown in 5.1. This allows control of the
design process as the consumer, product and process activities are coordinated into
small mini-projects with specific objectives. The activities and some of the
experimental techniques in the various stages of product design and process
development are shown in 5.1. The stages used in this book are ‘getting the feel’,
screening, ball-park studies, optimisation, scale-up (production) and scale-up
(marketing).
In the design, both the input variables to the process and the output variables of the
product qualities are identified early in the developments. The input variables are: • raw
materials: type, quality, quantity; • processing variables: types of processing,
processing conditions. The output variables are: • product qualities; • product yields
The levels of the input variables that are possible in the production are identified and
used in the design experimentation. The level of a raw material (or ingredient) is the
percentage in the formulation. Raw materials and ingredients are sometimes
differentiated: raw materials as the primary products from agricultural and marine
sources, and ingredients as processed materials. In this book, raw materials includes
both, and mean all materials used in the process. The levels of processing variables are
related to physical, chemical and microbiological measurements and also the
achievable and necessary limits set by equipment and environmental conditions. There
are limits set on the input variables by the needs of the product, processing and costs;
there may be a lower level and a higher level, or just one of these. Identifying these
levels early in the design reduces the time spent on experimentation. The product
qualities wanted by the consumer are identified and quantified. Usually a range is
discovered within which the product is acceptable; this sets the range within which the
quality has to be controlled. Again there are usually low and high levels identified for
the product qualities. The yield of product necessary to give acceptable costs is
identified early in the design to direct the raw material and process experimentation.
The design is a continuous study of the relationships between the input variables and

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the product qualities, so that the final product prototype is the optimum product under
the conditions of the process. The two main parts of product design are making and
testing the product prototypes, and the two important groups of people are the
designers (often called developers in the food industry) and the consumers. The
prototype products are tested under the standards set by the product design
specifications, so that product testing needs to be organised along with the product
design and the processing experiments. Regularly there is consumer input, to confirm
that the product is developing characteristics as identified in the product concept and
not developing characteristics which are neither wanted nor needed by the consumer.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the product design ends with a final product prototype and a
feasibility report: • defining the feasibility of the product for technical production, the
market and the company; • anticipating the technical and market success; • assessing
the financial feasibility; and • predicting associated impacts on the company and the
market of various levels of product success. Gathering information for the feasibility
report is an important part of the design process. 5.3 Steps in product design and
process development Carrying out the design in the five successive steps listed in 5.1
goes some way towards eliminating the mistakes of choosing the wrong design and
also making the product on a large scale when very little is known of the processing
system. 5.3.1 'Getting the feel' This is a continuation of the development of the product
concept and the product design specifications. The processing methods and conditions
outlined in the product design specifications are used to make the early product
prototypes, and the technical testing methods are examined for reliability and accuracy
in testing both the technical product characteristics and also their relationships to the
consumer product characteristics. There is a question of consumer involvement at this
stage; some people advocate this strongly because it means that there is control over
the design; others say that it is faster and just as accurate to use the knowledge of the
designers. The choice of no consumer testing depends on the level of consumer
knowledge held by the designer. The basic costing used in the company is also
identified so that a simple method of determining costs can be used in the next stages

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of the product design. The target market was identified in the product concept stage
and the consumers are selected to represent this target market(s). 5.3.2 Screening
Screening reduces the wide range of raw material and processing variables to the input
variables affecting important product qualities. This hastens the design. Initially the
variables can be reduced using the previous knowledge of the designer and also
published or company information easily available. There can still be a number of
floating variables and these are studied in controlled experimentation, not 'ad hoc' try-
and-see experimentation. Many experimental designs are available to screen the
variables but the most common are partial factorial designs, or Plackett and Burman
designs. In a Plackett and Burman design, it is possible to screen N-1 variables with N
experiments. The screening experiments identify the important variables and their
magnitude levels that affect the product qualities, but they are not statistically accurate
and cannot quantify the relationships between the input variables and the product
qualities. Some food designers have the consumers test many samples in these designs,
sometimes for acceptability, but more usefully in product profile tests. Other designers
use trained sensory panels. At this stage, the raw materials are being selected, and the
quality, availability and costs of those raw materials are studied. There is likely a basic
total cost range for the raw materials, but it is important not to select individual
materials only on cost at this stage. Higher qualities of raw materials may give a unique
property to the product, and also the more expensive materials may not need to be used
in the same quantities as the cheaper. Sometimes there are restrictions in the company
on the raw materials that are to be used; the buying department can often give some
indications without restricting the design. 5.3.3 Ball-park studies In ball-park studies,
the aim is to set the limits of the raw materials and the processing variables which give
acceptable product qualities as judged by the consumer. By this stage, the variables are
reduced in number and their outside limits are set. They are examined in factorial
designs, and for raw materials in mixture designs. In factorial designs each input
variable is considered at high and low levels, and the combinations of these high and
low levels for all input variables are tested. In a full design all possible combinations

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are run, therefore for three variables the total number is 23 = 8 experiments. In food
formulations, mixture designs are often used because it is impossible to vary one
ingredient while holding all the others constant; in mixture designs, the sum of all the
ingredients in the formulation must add to 100%. The product designer must always be
aware that when they change the content of one ingredient, the proportion of the other
ingredients changes, for example reducing the fat content will increase the proportion
of other ingredients: carbohydrate, protein or water. With factorial designs and mixture
designs, the effects of the various input variables, alone and together, on the product
qualities are analysed, and mathematical relationships developed between the input
variables and the product qualities. To set up the experimentation and to analyse the
results, there is computer software readily available for food product development.
Both technical testing and consumer testing of these product prototypes are carried out.
The consumers are testing for acceptability and the technical tests are examining the
chemical, microbiological, physical and sometimes the sensory properties of the
products. Accuracy and reliability are important considerations in this testing, both for
studying the effects of the input variables on the product qualities and for developing
the quality assurance programme. The total processing costs of these product
prototypes are compared to identify the effects of the input variables on the costs, and
to check that the costs are within the target cost range
Think Break 5.1 Steps in product design and process development: consumer testing
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of consumers testing the prototypes in
'Getting the feel', 'Screening' and 'Ball-park' experimentation. For what types of
products – packaging change, product improvement, product line extension, product
innovation – would you use consumer testing and at what stages in the product and
process development.
Optimisation Here the aim is to optimise the overall product quality by determining the
levels of the input variables which will give the best possible product quality. The
problem is that often when optimising one product quality, another product quality is
less than optimum. So it is a case of setting the relative importance of product qualities,

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and for the most important product qualities studying the formulation and processing
variables to find the optimum. But the limits that are acceptable across all the product
qualities need to be known so that during the optimising experiments none of the other
product qualities become unacceptable. . For raw material formulations, linear
programming can be used to optimise a number of product qualities and costs with the
amounts of raw materials in the formulation held between upper and lower levels. 5.3.5
Scale-up Scale-up (or ramp-up) of both the production and the marketing is the last
stage of the product design and process development. The production scale-up is the in-
plant test to verify that the product can be made at the quality and quantity required,
and the marketing scale-up is a large consumer test to verify that the target consumers
will buy the product and what marketing strategy will encourage this buying. The aim
of the processing scale-up is to determine the optimum production process for product
quality, product yield, process control and costs. If the previous design research has
combined the product and the process, this can be achieved without too many
problems. But if the process has been ignored, then there can be disastrous problems.
For example, if some of the intermediate materials have never been pumped during the
design experimentation, then they could break down during scale-up. The scale-up can
be either on a pilot plant or short production runs on the main plant. If it is a new
process, or there is to be quite extensive experimentation, then the scale-up is
conducted on a pilot or small-scale plant. If the process is only an adaptation of the
present production, then the scale-up is conducted on the main production plant. The
decisions on the type of scale-up are often much influenced by cost; the production trial
can cost a great deal if the product cannot be sold and this restricts the use of the
production plant until the final stage. But if there is no investment money to build a
pilot plant then the production run may be the only scale-up available. The question
can often be asked as to when the scale-up from the laboratory bench to the small plant
to the production line should be carried out. A great deal of time can be spent
perfecting a product in the laboratory, only to find that it is impossible to duplicate this
in the plant. If the product is rushed from the laboratory to the production line, then

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there can be a great deal of raw material and product discarded at a substantial cost.
Knowledge of the interrelationship of the processing variables and the product qualities
can reduce these failures. EVOP (evolutionary operations) are used in optimising the
process variables, especially if using the production line in scale-up. EVOP is a way of
plant operation that tests small changes in the process variables in a simple factorial
design. It continuously changes the process variables until optimum product qualities
are reached, but only slowly so that the product can be used for large scale testing or
even sold. The marketing scale-up aims to define the market, describe the market
strategy to reach this market and predict the possible sales revenues for the product.
Possible market channels are studied and the market channel suitable for reaching the
target consumers and for the company is chosen. The price range related to the
production costs, competitors' pricing and company policy is tested with consumers to
see how it affects their buying intentions. Also the final product concept (the product
proposition) is built up from the final prototype product, the packaging design and
consumer studies. The definitions of the product, price and market channel are used not
only to develop the aims and methods for the promotion of the product but are also the
basis for planning the marketing mix during product commercialisation. The final
prototype product from the production scale-up and the various parts of the marketing
strategy are tested in a large-scale consumer test where the consumers test the product
in their usual environment and are interviewed about the marketing strategy.
Think Break 5.2 Activities in product design and process development: rice risotto The
company has decided to produce a rice risotto, a dry flavoured mix to which only
boiling water is added to give a quick snack, similar in use to instant noodles. Identify
some of the important activities in the design of this product.

2.3 Concurrent Engineering:

Is a strategy where all the tasks involved in product development are
done in parallel. Collaboration between all individuals, groups and departments
within a company.
• Customer research

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• Designers
• Marketing
• Accounting

• Engineering

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2.4 Design for Excellence or Design For Excellence (DfX or DFX), are terms and
expansions used interchangeably in the existing literature, where the X in design for
X is a variable which can have one of many possible values. In many fields (e.g., very-
large-scale integration (VLSI) and nanoelectronics) X may represent several traits or
features including: manufacturability, power, variability, cost, yield, or reliability. This
gives rise to the terms design for manufacturability (DfM, DFM), design for
inspection (DFI), design for variability (DfV), design for cost (DfC). Similarly, other
disciplines may associate other traits, attributes, or objectives for X.
Under the label design for X, a wide set of specific design guidelines are summarized.
Each design guideline addresses a given issue that is caused by, or affects the traits of,
a product. The design guidelines usually propose an approach and corresponding
methods that may help to generate and apply technical knowledge to control, improve,
or even invent particular traits of a product. From a knowledge-based view, the design
guideline represents an explicit form of knowledge, that contains information
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about knowing-how-to (see Procedural knowledge). However, two problems are

prevalent. First, this explicit knowledge (i.e., the design guidelines) were transformed
from a tacit form of knowledge (i.e., by experienced engineers, or other specialists).
Thus, it is not granted that a freshman or someone who is outside the subject area will
comprehend this generated explicit knowledge. This is because it still contains
embedded fractions of knowledge or respectively include non-obvious assumptions,
also called context-dependency (see e.g. Doz and Santos, 1997:16–18). Second, the
traits of a product are likely to exceed the knowledge base of one human. There exists a
wide range of specialized fields of engineering, and considering the whole life cycle of
a product will require non-engineering expertise. For this purpose, examples of design
guidelines are listed in the following.

2.5 Rules, guidelines, and methodologies along the product life cycle

DfX methodologies address different issues that may occur in one or more phase of
a product life cycle:
• Development phase
• Production phase
• Use phase
• Disposal phase
Each phase is explained with two dichotomous categories of tangible products to show
differences in prioritizing design issues in certain product life cycle phases:
• Consumer durables
• Capital goods
Non-durables that are consumed physically when used, e.g. chocolate or lubricants, are
not discussed. There also exist a wide range of other classifications because products
are either a) goods b) service or c) both (see OECD and Eurostat, 2005:48). Thus, one
can also refer to whole product, augmented product, or extended product. Also the
business unit strategy of a firm are ignored, even though it significantly influences
priority-setting in design.

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2.6 Modeling and Simulation (M&S)

Modeling and simulation (M&S) is the use of a physical or logical representation of
a given system to generate data and help determine decisions or make predictions about
the system. M&S is widely used in the social and physical sciences, engineering,
manufacturing and product development, among many other areas.

Applications of modeling and simulation include:

• Creating models of weather systems, simulating behavior based on available
data to generate predictive information for forecasts. A hurricane forecast model,
for example, is designed to predict a given storm's track and intensity, as well as
related events such as storm surges.
• Simulating the effect of severe weather events like hurricanes and storm
surges on infrastructure to guide the design of more resilient systems.
• Creating a program to model a social situation and observing the behavior of
individuals in the simulation when the program runs. Social simulations can be used
to yield predictive data about how things happen in real-world environments, such
as how social norms develop.
• Simulating how a physical change to a system will affect its performance. For
example, NASA has explored drone aerodynamics with logical models simulating
air pressures and currents around the rotors. That information could potentially be
used to develop designs that reduce turbulence, which would make the vehicles
quieter in operation.

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