How can design and manufacturing engineering teams align with customer needs?

The House of Quality is an excellent tool to bring these groups together to focus the product to meet the customer's requirements and design for manufacturing. It's critical that a product has the characteristics to meet the customer's requirements but you also need to be able to manufacture it economically.

In the current scenario of any business, it's Paramount to provide a value added solution to the customer needs rather than providing a standard solution to customer needs. In order to do that, we need to completely understand the customer needs in terms of product requirements in real time condition, gaps in the current scenario, and their intended goal that they are trying to achieve with the product performance. By doing so, we would be able to focus on the key area in which the real problem exists. The above study shall be carried out in real time condition by a techno commercial team. Further this field study report shall be discussed with product technical team for value added proposal and solution for client needs.

"Product data sheet" is a document that breaks the customer specification, datasheet information into quantified product specific requirements viz product standard, application requirements (intended design function and performance), material selection, site conditions, certifications and anything that links to product performance and life, risk parameters etc., Further this document shall be used for compliance study. This will give a complete idea on the project alignment and required product compliance.

Investing in a “CoDesign” way of thinking is key to design - mfg effective collaboration. You want to make it super easy for these two different domains to work together early in the process by giving them a common place to review and make decisions. A great place to start is pulling DFM/DFMA ahead to earlier design stages and doing it in parallel where mfg has a real say in the design upfront and doesn’t just come in as “the bad guy” later. To do this you need to invest in how your team works together - if there is friction the teams will revert to their silos and not do this work until forced to do it. But it is possible… I see it on a daily basis at CoLab between designers, quality, manufacturing, suppliers and more!

Design failure mode and effect analysis technique shall be used in the design and development process. This technique will integrate the design and manufacturing team in one line during the initial stages of product design and release. This technique not only focuses on design parameters but also discusses the risk associated with manufacturing / assembly, testing that leads to product failure. This technique will ensure the voices from the cross functional team are reviewed and validated with justification / action plan.

It is crucial that product design teams and manufacturing teams collaborate on a product launch from day one. The best launches I've ever been part of included some cadence of collaboration between design and manufacturing in which each discipline highlights the critical issues and characteristics represented in their respective discipline. Admittedly, sometimes this collaboration gets chippy, but that's OK! The feedback is priceless. While digital tools and VR are important, nothing beats face-to-face meetings between the various disciplines involved in producing customer-pleasing products.

In recent days, Power Bi has become the most effective platform to communicate the project status, statistics on product performance and testing etc., This would further be customized as a collaborative tool for external and internal. customers.

Value analysis and value engineering is one of the agile principle in design and development process. This technique will assess the product design with reference to sub level components and its value associated with the intended function of the product. This analysis will provide a value figure to each component against the intended function of the product. This value analysis shall help us to optimize the design, material selection and process requirements which will further reduce the product cost and eliminate waste from the process. In addition to this, Kaizen technique shall also be used for continuous improvement in existing product Kaizen considers any improvements associated with safety, moral, quality, product and delivery