Unit 3: Product Design and Process Selection

 If you have purchased a mobile phone recently, you have witnessed a product category with perhaps the most diverse range of product designs in the marketplace. The variety can be mind-boggling. Looking back a year or two, you can probably recall a design that looked very promising, but simply faded away from the shelves after a few months. Have you ever wondered what happened to those short-lived products?

Businesses want to design the products that consumers demand. A good marketing department can tell the organization what consumers want, and even convince consumers that they want it. A company with the most wonderful product concept cannot be successful unless it also can devise a process to profitably manufacturer the product. In this unit, we will consider the steps involved in designing a product with the manufacturing process in mind. We will look at several models that businesses can use to select the best design process or analyze an existing process.