How can you identify and prioritize improvement opportunities in product engineering?

The customer is always right is a phrase that has been around for a long while. And it still stands. As with any product you cannot satisfy 100% of the needs with any one or series of models however you can satisfy the majority. And you would be surprised how a small investment of offering a little more on a model can grow the sales and satisfaction. Engineering create great products and models but it takes customer feedback and the additional innovation based on that in order to make the product truly great and successful.

Prioritizing improvement opportunities in product engineering involves making multi-criteria decisions while balancing the risk of success, impact, and effort. If you're just starting out, it's essential to focus on opportunities that have low risk, low effort, and reasonable impact to build momentum. Later on, you can tackle high-effort and high-risk opportunities that have potentially significant impacts. One tool I have used for identifying opportunities is the SWOT analysis. It helps evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a product or service, which can guide decision-making. For prioritization one simple tool is the Pareto principle (80/20 rule)

The answer to product improvement is always from the customer, and typically that requires knowledgeable inquiry of the customer

The use of tools that support the clear communication and easily deploy a proper description of your process can enhance and give agility to the process. The SIPOC tools with the description of your steps as a sequence of internal costumers with clear requirements and goals to proper feed the next step is example of that. The exercise will easily point to main factors that add value and factors on your product that are non value added.

Biggest gap I see in product engineering, early design phase, is assuring design for manufacturability. Need to have understanding of manufacturing processes which are capable of making the part type you are designing…it will save steps in redesign / optimization loops, improve function and stack up…

You always want to make the customer happy. If you are having issues with the machine you do a perato chart of the issue and track how many time a shift the issue is happening. Then you look for the root cause and come up with a corrective action to solve the issue. Some times you improve the out put more and make your team happier and also the customer.

First, chat with your team and customers to see what's bugging them the most about your product. What's causing headaches or making them grumble? Once you've got a list of those pain points, figure out how much each one messes with your product's success – whether that's causing users to bail or just making everyone's life harder. Then, start with the biggest headaches and work your way down. Fixing what's driving folks crazy first can make a big difference and keep your users happy.

I agree with Rajan Patel. Launching a new product is nice, but fixing the current product problems seems like the best second step after establishing a clear definition of the customers’ needs (Voice of Customer).

Ideas are everywhere around the product, in every person who participates in one way or another in any step of the product life cycle. Most of the time the point is to capture the ideas... to have the right forum, methodology or process capable of conveying them and concentrating them into a set of proposals. And these "idea capturers" must be different at each step of the product life cycle (design reviews, surveys, forms, mobile applications...) and end up in a backlog of Product Engineering projects, where they can be analyzed and executed if considered.

Prioritization is not an easy task and depend on the industry where you are active in. If your business are medical devices, like my one, the first scale is clearly RISK assessment. Rather often with help of related standards. Long space nothing... and in the end is comparison of financial benefit and investment needed. And do not forget that investment are not direct money only, but time, space, etc.

En realidad he aplicado mucho el tema de identificar criterios para poder cruzarlos y poder ver con más claridad cuál puede ser la posible priorización, pero adicional a ello, luego de dicha identificación es importante escuchar nuevamente a tu equipo de trabajo para evitar que algo importante nos quede por fuera y lo trabajamos como un complemento.

Prioritize on the right criteria and you will head in a productive direction. For new product that is a simple extension to an existing product, the criteria will likely be defined as some enhancement to existing product parameters, e.g. higher strength or longer durability. More often than not, you will be chasing a bottom line improvement, so your rankings are clearly cost or efficiency driven. Most improvement ideas must fit into an existing management framework while simultaneously meeting cost, time and quality. Keeping the prioritisation process as objective as possible is important. I like to use a solid decision analysis process to keep my enthusiasm from taking over and biasing the priorities.

One common and fairly simple-to-use tool for corrective actions prioritising, is the benefit vs effort 4 quadrant matrix. Firstly, you would be generating a blank x-y chart with 4 areas. Closest to the origin area would be for the low benefit/low effort actions, and further to the origin high cost/high benefit ones. After classifying your list of ideas depending on the expected impact (low/high) and the cost (low/high) you assign them to the corresponding quadrant. Finally, you decide which group of actions you will focus first. Usually you would target low effort / high benefit as the priority, then high/high, then low/low and finally, you can decide whether low impact/high cost actions are worth to be implementated, sometimes they aren't.

Unless you're a blacksmith directly working a lump of metal to some new end shape, implementing anything usually requires some degree of system engineering to support prototyping. Whether that is tweaking an existing process to produce a new outcome, modifying equipment to support that outcome, or modifying code to change how the process works, you will be taking some risk. A steady structured approach will permit you to know what you need to change and why you get an outcome you either expected or were surprised by. You will want to repeat your successes. Record everything. This may require you to improve your understanding of your existing process first. The approach you take should be left open based on the nature of the improvement.

Muito útil as informa??es compartilhadas. Mas algo importante na atualidade na engenharia de produto é estabecer procedimento para melhoria continua desse produto nos aspectos gerais desde a produ??o e sua eficiência no uso buscando informa??es junto ao usuário final se atendeu suas especifica??es e se pode ser melhorado.

Knowledge reuse through knowledge briefs with trade off curves is a very important best practice of product development. Unfortunately far too few American companies are using knowledge briefs.

I was once told at an engineering conference that engineers should steal as many ideas as they can, within the bounds of IP of course. Within your own company there is no limit to idea theft as long as there is appropriate attribution. Externally, cross discipline idea appropriation may also be appropriate, also with attribution. Opening up effective knowledge sharing channels across business units and between businesses can also save you enormous amounts of wheel reinvention time. The efforts of the few can spawn whole industries. A prime example would be the story of Linux and its children.