Product Design Teams Research Articles

Determinants of new product designers' satisfaction with suppliers' contributions

Abstract A recent trend in product development is the move to outsource more of the design and development work. Specifically, manufacturing firms are looking to component suppliers to increase their roles from that of supplying specified components to that of sharing in or taking major responsibility for component design and development. Effective teaming of product designers and the allied suppliers is likely to become an increasingly important element in the product innovation process. However, this role may be unfamiliar to both product development staff and component supplier staff. This study examines perceptions of new product designers about the component suppliers they used for the design of critical technology in recent new product development projects. The study focuses on how the suppliers were viewed in terms of their technical capability and how it contributed to the project, as well as their capability to work effectively with the product design team. Results indicate that the cooperativeness of the supplier was probably more influential than its technical competence in influencing the willingness of the product designer to bring the component supplier into future development projects.

Interdisciplinary project work: practice makes perfect?

This paper reports the findings of an action research study into a major interdisciplinary group project. The project was performed over one semester by some 180 third-year undergraduate students majoring in engineering and design disciplines at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom. The paper discusses the rationale behind the project, the academic background of the students and the project brief. In addition, the assessment criteria used by the academic staff to assess the work of the groups is introduced. The paper utilizes the research findings to identify and discuss a number of changes in students' performance, attitude and culture. The results of the research into undergraduate multi-disciplinary teams are compared to findings from research into multi-disciplinary projects operated in the European motor car industry. Finally, a comparison is then made with current findings of studies of student multi-disciplinary work in the American academic environment. The author concludes that multi-disciplinary product design teams yield many tangible benefits including the rapid development of marketable products. Undergraduate students also gain many intangible benefits such as improved interpersonal skills, positive emotions and an increase in personal performance and motivation through working in multi-disciplinary teams.

The Psychology of Lean Production

As one of the originators of the term “ lean production” (although certainly not of the ideas behind the name, which I and my colleagues simply synthesised from the practices of a number of Japanese e rms led by Toyota), it is a pleasure to observe the spread of interest in this concept to a range of academic disciplines including applied psychology. Ironically, the main point of my commentary will be that the analysis of lean production in comparison with the previous dominant industrial paradigm of mass production is perhaps weakest in the area of . . . applied psychology! However, before pursuing this point let me briee y summarise my view of the current degree of adoption of lean production. At the time we were conducting our research at MIT in the late 1980s, we could e nd practically no examples in Western companies in which all of the key elements of lean production— in the primary work team, in overall organisation of physical production, in the product design team, in the method of dealing with suppliers, and in the method of dealing with customers— were in place. Knowing the long history of the diffusion of mass production from the USA to both Japan and Europe and the many wrong steps along the path, our greatest concern was that the most useful aspects of Japanese innovations would be ignored or rejected by managers, union leaders, and employees in Western e rms. In 1995, the situation is much changed and our worst fears have not come to pass. Indeed, in researching a new book, which I and my colleague Professor Daniel Jones are just completing, we found many examples of the

SBD System Design

A simulation-based approach to concurrent engineering enables early consideration of downstream life cycle processes by supporting the development of virtual prototypes of products and processes and providing for their simulation and evaluation in synthetic environments rep resenting the entire product life cycle To be effective, a system supporting such an approach must adopt a highly integrated view of concurrent engineering This includes the provision of rich, dynamically extensible product and process descriptions, availability of high-level computing en vironments facilitating assembly and invocation of design analysis tools and simulations, and an overall collaborative framework supporting dis tributed product design and development teams Each of these areas is being incorporated into the development of the Simulation-Based Design (SBD) Phase II system prototype

Driving concurrency in a distributed concurrent engineering project team: a specification for an Engineering Moderator

SUMMARY Industry requires CAE systems of the future to be highly flexible and to provide support on multiple levels: assisting the activities both of individual engineers and of complete product design teams. The CAE system must provide accurate, consistent information to all users. It should also actively promote exchange of information and knowledge between team members. In outline an architecture for CAE systems of the future is proposed, and the purpose and structure of the various elements of this architecture are discussed. In particular a specialist, supervisory, co-ordinator application, called the Engineering Moderator is introduced in detail, and its performance requirements specified. This application addresses some fundamental requirements for provision of support for team working in a concurrent engineering environment, by encouraging and facilitating communication between team members.

Design + Information: the state of information

An insufficient flow of information leads to inadequately designed products. There are several reasons why designers do not receive good information. Designers have no training in research, and rarely conduct their own research studies. They therefore must rely on research performed by persons in other fields. This information, in turn, is poorly adaptable to the designer’s needs. An information gap exists. Contributing to the problem are project schedules and budgets that unreasonably limit the amount of time that can be invested in the gathering and assimilation of information. On the horizon is the utilization of multi-disciplinary research teams that will apply their efforts to design. In the meantime, information gathering is a tedious process that needs to be performed as expediently and as painlessly as possible. A librarian with an understanding of the design process can be a vital member of a product design team.

Optimizing a Portable Terminal Keyboard for Combined One-Handed and Two-Handed use

Human factors experimentation facilitated the design of a portable terminal keyboard for combined one-handed and two-handed operation. To ensure a comfortable grip, the terminal had to be made smaller by reducing the size of its keyboard. The product design team needed to know how small the keyboard could be before it degraded the usability of the keyboard and the overall product. The keyboard experiment was designed primarily to determine the effect of both the number of hands used in typing and key spacing on typing speed and accuracy. A total of six commercially available keyboards with key spacings varying from 0.75 to 0.45 inches were tested. Test subjects with typing skills ranging from expert to novice typed separate samples of text on each keyboard, once using one hand and once using two hands. The difference in typing speed between two and one-handed typing averaged 2—1. A key spacing less than about 0.7 inches substantially reduced typing speed but did not increase errors. Poor typists typed at roughly the same speed no matter the key spacing or number of hands used. These findings and additional human factors studies provided parameters for a keyboard smaller than standard size that is expected to allow users to achieve 90 percent of the typing speed possible on a standard size keyboard without decreasing accuracy.

Automated Data Collection

Human factors organizations frequently are requested to provide recommendations about design choices to a product design team. These recommendations should be based on operator performance data. However, in many cases the required information may not be present in the current literature and time and personnel resources may be limited. This paper describes how this problem has been solved by the Human Factors group in IBM at Boca Raton. We are using the IBM Personal Computer as a process controller for studies in our lab. This low cost tool facilitates the automation of studies which require the recording of data for subsequent analysis. The Personal Computer has also been used to analyze the data.