Improving Engineering Design Designing for Competitive Advantage (1991) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 5-14
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From page 5... ...
international competitiveness has been ascribed to many factors, among them national fiscal and trade policies, exchange rates, national "culture," deficiencies in manufacturing, industrial management and accounting practices, Im fair foreign trade practices, and methods of providing capital. A crucial factor that is not often recognized is the quality of engineering design in U.S.
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Figure 3 summarizes the results of a study done using He PIMS data base that shows the effects of quality and market share on profitability for a large group of U.S. industries, predominantly manufacturers.6 THE CENTRAL ROLE OF ENGINEERING DESIGN High-quality products satisfy customer needs for reliability, serviceability, and acceptable life cycle cost, as well as for functionality and aesthetics.
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Effective design and manufacturing, both necessary to produce highquality products, are closely interrelated, but effective design is a prerequisite for effective manufacturing; quality cannot be manufactured or tested into a product, it must be designed into it.7 Figure 4, derived from studies done at Westinghouse and General Motors, suggests that a major fraction of the total life cycle cost for a product is committed in the early stages of design.8 As products become more complex, containing more and more parts, manufacturing yield falls dramatically unless design efforts can create parts and manufacturing operations of extremely high quality. This sensitivity of final product quality to component quality as complexity increases may be readily demonstrated.
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Involvement of Manufactunng Departnent 4 CONCEPT O F(JLLSCALE FORMULATION ~ ,~ DEVELOPMENT LL O ' Figure 4: Life Cycle Cost Commitment 100 90 80 70 60 ~ ~0 40 30 20 10 IMPROVING ENGINEERING DESIGN LIFE CYCLE PHASES 1. Define Use Patterns 2.
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When measurements are made, it becomes clear that U.S. indus~y's loss of market share In many industries results from poor performance in the very areas in which successful foreign companies, particularly some Japanese companies, usually excel.~° Loss of market share resulting from poor design is likely to spread as foreign competition expands into other industries— aerospace, large appliance, and cosmetics industries being likely near-term ~gets.
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The social component includes corporate organization and culture, team design methods, the nature of the design task and of the designer, customer attributes, and employee involvement. An ever-evolving problem-solving activity, engineering design encompasses many different and increasingly advanced practices, including methods for converting performance requirements into product features, computerintegrated manufacturing, cross-functional teams, statistical methods, competitive benchmarking of products, computerized design techniques, and new materials and manufacturing processes.
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A higher rate of new product introduction in these foreign firms results in more rapid learning, which translates into more rapid improvement of design and manufacturing processes. Improvement migrates slowly in the United States because the process of sharing and disseminating design knowledge among companies remains dependent on informal networking of individuals.
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From page 13... ...
In the United States, federal and state government policies have not traditionally been directed toward helping private enterprises enhance their competitiveness through adoption of advanced technologies, in part because technology-based industries have in the past faced little serious competition from foreign firms. Now nearly all foreign competition in high-valueadded products is strengthened to some extent by venous foreign government measures to increase the technological strength of key industries.
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These graduates will augment and eventually replace a generation of designers who received limited coherent engineering design education. Students who emerge from graduate engineering design programs familiar with current advances in theoretical foundations of design and forefront methodologies will not only contribute to engineering practice, but also be prepared to create new design tools, teach design to next generation students, and conduct research in design.
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