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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
particularly big 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 in order to attract customers.
Product attractiveness and product winning values offered
to customers are the result of the great effort and
energy spent by leading companies. Those companies are
looking for efficiency of using resources and time
with reduction of no value activities. They focus on the
effectiveness of the product development process
as the source of the product values offered to customers
and the company position on the market.
Companies are using tens of design development methods,
design reviews, analysis techniques and control
methods to improve quality of the products released to
the market, and the reality is sometimes unexpected.
Most of existing products are analyzed by professional
teams and results of those evaluations are provided
to the public as the consumers reports. It surprises quite
often that some of the popular products get low
rating or even the "not recommended" label.
That downgrading is usually related to the quality problems.
CAD systems are powerful and still improving, very sophisticated
computer analysis programs are available,
tens of methods for the product quality enhancement and
problems solving are used. Companies still have
never ending 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. Consumers do not know
about that, but if the product problems affect end users
then it may become tricky for the company.
Those problems happen mostly on complex assemblies with
mechanisms. Parts are breaking, components
disengage from assembly, operation is rough or unpleasant,
parts squeak or rattle, color deteriorates,...etc.
Products may have issues with their performance, some may
have difficulties with installation or service and
the most dangerous situation is when 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 three thousand plastic products
and several
thousands of 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 products problems were material,
tooling, manufacturing and part abuse related,
and halve 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 in 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 easily 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.
All three causes of design errors relate to the lack of
knowledge or lack of applying particular knowledge to
the product during its design. These three causes can
be eliminated with the proper design methodology
and with the specific detailed knowledge applied to the
designed product.
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