Design teams should consist of design engineers, manufacturing engineers, service representatives, marketing managers, customers, dealers, finance representatives, industrial designers, quality and testing personnel, purchas- ing representatives, suppliers, regulation compliance experts, factory work- ers, specialized talent, and representatives from other projects. First, this helps to ensure that all the design considerations will be covered. Second, such diversity can lead to a better design because of contributions from many perspectives. This synergy results in a better design than could result from a homogeneous team consisting only of design engineers or scientists.
Key tenets of the Honda product development process are trust, which comes from teamwork and shared knowledge, and equality, which means to “recognize, respect and benefit from individual differences.”93 Kaj Linden, the research director at Nokia, says, “The common denominator of Nokia’s R&D stems from concurrent engineering efforts in which prod- uct development, sales, and production units cooperate significantly.”94
It is very important that all team members are present and active early so that they will make meaningful contributions to the design team.
Everyone on the team should work well together and be receptive to everyone else’s contributions. Team members need not all be full time, but they should not be so preoccupied with other tasks that they cannot make meaningful contributions. All team members should actively participate in the product development, not waiting for “designers” to design some- thing and then reacting to their designs. Some of the key team members are described here.
2.9.1 Manufacturing and Service
The participation of manufacturing and service personnel is crucial to ensure that the product development team designs manufacturability and serviceability into the product. Manufacturing engineers have the respon- sibility of making sure that products are being designed for stable pro- cesses that are already in use or for new processes that will be concurrently designed as the product is designed. Manufacturing and service represen- tatives must not wait until the stage where there are drawings to mark up.
Their role is to help design the product and constantly influence the design to ensure manufacturability and serviceability. Manufacturing represen- tatives must be isolated from the daily emergencies and firefighting that occur in manufacturing, because urgent matters usually take precedence over important matters.
Problems can arise when manufacturing engineers view team participa- tion as a career opportunity to migrate into engineering, designing one portion of the product very well for manufacturability, while the remain- der of the product has manufacturability ignored.
Valuable knowledge can be obtained from all manufacturing and ser- vice people by asking them to fill out survey forms for factory feedback and field service feedback (see Appendix C).
2.9.2 Tooling Engineers
When new or custom processes and tooling are required, they should be designed concurrently with the products. If current manufacturing pro- cedures are inadequate for cost, time, or quality, then new processes may need to be concurrently developed.
Look for opportunities to create innovative tooling that replaces slow, costly, and poor- quality processing. Concurrently develop tooling and fix- tures that are faster, more efficient, quick loading, more accurate, partially mechanized, or automated.
2.9.3 Purchasing and Vendors
Purchasing agents should help design teams select parts for the best bal- ance of cost, quality, and availability. Instead of just throwing a single spec over the wall and telling purchasing to “just buy it,” engineers should pro- vide a performance range so purchasing agents can look for the best price
and availability within the entire range. Sometimes, a higher performance part may have a lower price and better availability if it is mass- produced and is in widespread use, as shown in Figure 5.6.
Purchasing’s other role should be to set up and manage vendor part- nerships for custom parts, as discussed in Section 2.6. These partnerships should be used instead of bidding, for reasons discussed in Section 6.11.
2.9.4 Marketing
Marketing is the link to the customer and must help the team define the product so that it listens to the voice of the customer. Product definition will be discussed in Section 2.11.
Cooperation between engineering and marketing is a key determinant of product development success. A study of 289 projects found that when there was “harmony” between engineering and marketing, there were only 13% failures. On the other hand, when there was “severe disharmony,” the results were the opposite: only 11% of projects succeeded!95
2.9.5 Customers
Product development teams should be close to customers and under- stand how they use products. Toyota engineers spend months talking to customers and dealers to understand what customers want in new prod- uct designs.96
A key aspect of Guidant’s product development process for surgical tools is to have engineers observe surgical procedures and gain understanding and get feedback directly from customers.
When Hewlett- Packard’s (now Philips) Medical Products Group devel- ops ultrasound imaging systems, they construct full- size nonfunctional models for doctors to evaluate usability in hospitals. This gives the prod- uct development team valuable early feedback on all aspects of the user interface, including how well a doctor wearing gloves can grasp probes and switches, extend and retract cords, read displays, move the system from room to room, and so forth.
One reason for Rubbermaid’s early success was that its product devel- opment teams were so close to customers and products that they could minimize market testing, which dramatically reduced the time- to- market and made it harder for competitors to copy their products as clones or knock- offs.97
It is becoming more common to have customers themselves actually participating on product development teams. When Boeing developed the 777, they invited representatives of their customers, the airlines, to help design the product. At first, Boeing engineers were apprehensive, but they soon learned the value of hearing detailed customer input in the design stage.98
Xerox does brainstorming or “dreaming with the customer” on its product development efforts. The goal is “involving experts who know the technology with customers who know the pain points.”99
Toymaker LEGO Group “went straight to its customers—namely robot enthusiasts—several years ago to help guide product development improvements to its Mindstorm product, creating a users’ panel and chal- lenging them to improve the company’s robotics kit.”100
Half a century ago, the Swiss– Swedish corporation ABB (formerly ASEA Brown Boveri) bought a minor US company that made electrical meters.
Their product development team brought in seven customers (utilities) representing various types of rural and urban markets. The customers signed nondisclosure agreements and these utilities got deals on the forth- coming product they helped develop. Because of this customer input, the new meter took over the market and became the standard electrical meter.
In 1929, a consortium of 28 streetcar operators (customers) and 25 man- ufacturers spent 5 years to jointly develop the next- generation “PCC” car for rapid acceleration, a quiet ride, aerodynamic styling, and regenerative braking. It was an overwhelming success, with 5,000 sold in the United States and 20,000 more in Europe. Hundreds still run today in cities such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston.101
An added value to involving customers in the design process is that it bonds them to the product and, thus, tends to make them more loyal cus- tomers when the new product comes out.
Industry Week’s “Best Plant” survey of the 25 top- performing candidate companies indicated that 96% of the companies surveyed used customer participation in product development efforts.102
2.9.6 Industrial Designers
These creative people need to be part of the design team so that prod- uct styling is not thrown over the wall to engineering, who must then fit everything into a pretty enclosure. It is an encouraging trend that the
leading industrial design firms are evolving away from a styling emphasis to include engineering, manufacturability, and usability.103
2.9.7 Quality and Test
The need for diagnostic testing is dependent on the “quality culture” of the company. If quality is designed into the product and then built in by processes that are in control, then the “fall out” will be so low that diag- nostic tests may not be needed. At IBM, products that were expected to have higher than a 98.5% first- pass- accept rate could avoid diagnostic test development and the expensive ATE (automatic test equipment) “bed- of- nails” testers. Above this threshold, it was more cost effective to discard defective printed circuit boards than to pay for the testers and test devel- opment. ATE testers cost millions of dollars, and for some printed circuit boards, test development can exceed the cost and the calendar time of product development!
2.9.8 Finance
Finance representatives can help decision making by providing relevant cost data, which does not automatically come from most accounting sys- tems. Implementing activity- based cost management, as discussed in Chapter 7, can provide data based on total cost considerations, which will lead to much more rational decision making (e.g., for tradeoff analysis of quality/ diagnostics, make/ buy decisions, off- the- shelf parts, quantifying quality costs, and quantifying overhead cost savings resulting from stan- dardization and modularity).
2.9.9 Regulatory Compliance
Every design team needs representatives who can ensure that all applica- ble regulations are satisfied by the initial product design, not by costly and time- consuming changes. Future regulations must also be considered, because regulations sometimes change faster than manufacturers can respond with another product development cycle. Some companies have legislative or environmental lawyers on the design teams to anticipate the impact of future regulations. Efficiently producing regional product varia- tions, for instance, for many countries, is one promising application of
mass customization (Section 4.3). This requires that the design team incor- porate the regulations of every customer country into the design process.
2.9.10 Factory Workers
Factory workers are a valuable source of input, either from actual par- ticipation on the design team or from surveys like the factory feedback form in Appendix C. Factory workers usually have no feedback chan- nel for their vast amount of knowledge on past manufacturability issues.
Factory worker participation in the design process may have the added benefit of improving labor relations and making the new product more easily accepted as it is launched into manufacturing.
2.9.11 Specialized Talent
Design teams may need help from specialized talent for automation, simulation, stress analysis, heat flow analysis, solid modeling, rapid pro- totyping, design of experiments, “robust” tolerancing, lab testing, safety, product liability, patent law, and so forth.
2.9.12 Other Projects
Coordinating multiple product development projects is important to maximize synergies, share work on common module design, and stan- dardize parts, modules, tooling, and processes.
The success of product development projects is determined by how well concurrent engineering is practiced: how complete the multifunctional team is; how early the entire team is active; and how well the team is led.
Locating people very close together (co- location) also helps ensure the success of product development teams.
The largest study of corporate failures, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes, emphasized the importance of multifunctional teams:
“Create crossfunctional teams and diverse work groups whose members will see things differently. Such heterogenous groups have been shown to be much better than homogeneous groups when it comes to developing new knowledge.”104