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Hundreds of companies from different industries have been
continuously releasing new developed products.
Most of companies want to be the world class leaders with
their products. They make every effort to attract
customers by offering new models of beautiful products
and by providing the highest quality at the right price.
Advertisement greatly influences customers on the purchasing
decisions but majority of the product features
considered by buyers for the product selection are related
to the product design.
Therefore lots of the new products have great styling,
new functions, new materials and stunning colors.
Most of manufacturers develop their products under high
competition pressure and automotive companies
face particular challenges with the new car models, mostly
because of high complexity of those products
and necessity of new technologies implementation to lead
or at least to follow trends. Product attractiveness
and winning values offered to customers are achieved mostly
by extensive development of that product.
Companies have access to sophisticated CAD systems, to
tens of design development methods, design
reviews, analysis techniques, to the product quality control
methods and despite that, some companies still
have continuous problems with quality of their products.
Profit is reduced by difficulties of parts manufacturing
and labor demanding assembly, by costly engineering changes,
by repairs of tooling, by extensive scrap rate
and by reworking of the already produced parts.
Most of those problems are internal and being solved with
more or less proper way. Customers do not know
about that, but if the product problems affect the end
users then it may become tricky for the company.
Market response to the released product may be not as
expected and product may not sell well.
The most dangerous situation is when the product has operational
use difficulty or safety problem.
Those problems may generate warranty costs, bad ratings
of the products with lower rating of the company
and sometimes it may result in extremely expensive recall
of the product.
Analysis of thousands of plastic products and their components
resulted in the following observations:
- Almost 80% of product assemblies had some imperfectly
designed features
- About 20% of plastic products had functional and durability
problems
- About 90% of all plastic products problems were directly
design related
- Those 10% of the remained problems were material, tooling,
manufacturing or product abuse related, and
some of those problems could be reduced with a different
design solution or different material selection.
Problems are always very expensive. That is why significant
portion of engineering work at some companies
is dedicated to the products improvement and to maintaining
quality of the product. Engineers are occupied
with the product problems solving, with scrap reduction,
with manufacturing process improvements and with
costly engineering changes.
It is interesting that analysis of the products problems
proves that most all of them are design related and
most of those problems could be eliminated or radically
reduced during the product design process.
So why those problems still exist?
There are three main causes of those problems existence
on products, simply said;
- design errors are made
- design errors are not detected
- errors are not eliminated.
The above causes of the product problems existance can be
avoided by implementing extensive design
knowledge, design skills, design tools and design methodology
during the product development.
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