PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

THROUGH CIM
 INTRODUCTION

The expectations of today’s customer include

superior quality and performance, higher

technological capabilities and on time delivery.

All these are to be provided at reduced costs

because of global competition faced by the

manufacturing industries.
 PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

Industries have to continuously upgrade their

products as well as introduce new products in the

market in order to retain as well as to increase their

market share.
 The product development is the responsibility

of the research and development (R&D)

department of a manufacturing company. When a

product is initially introduced the sales volume will

be low. If the product is good and satisfies the

customers, the sales will pick up.

• Sometimes, if there are any problems in the product

the company will have to make changes or

improvements in the product which is a very

expensive proposition.

• If the defect is serious enough the company may have

to recall an entire batch of products at enormous cost

and loss of goodwill.

 The sales and service department usually takes

care of attending to the customers’ problems.

That is why manufacturers of automobiles,

entertainment electronic goods, fast moving consumer

goods like washing machines and refrigerators etc

have elaborate sales and service network.

 The cycle through which a product goes

through from development to retirement is

called the product life cycle.

The product development cycle starts with

– Developing the product concept,

– Evolving the design,

– Engineering the product,

– Manufacturing the part,

– Marketing and servicing.

The idea of a product may come from a

• Patent,

• Suggestion of the customers,

• Feedback of the sales and service department,

• Marketing department or from the R&D department.

Next stage is the conceptualization of the product.

The cost at which the product could be sold in the market

is decided and the

• overall design in terms of shape,

• functional specifications,

• ergonomics,

• aesthetics etc
Next stage by the design department who carefully

designs each assembly and each component of the

assembly.

• Detailed design analysis and optimization is

carried out at this stage.

• Design may have several variants.

For example, a passenger car
• Down version with the bare minimum options

• Luxury versions with several add on

functionalities.

Between these two extreme versions,

Number of models or variants to meet the needs

of customers with different paying capacities.

In a similar way,

• Satellite launch vehicle may be designed for different

payloads.

• Fighter aircraft may have different versions.

• Refrigerator will have to be marketed with different capacities.

The design department creates these designs through a top

down approach or a bottom up approach.

1.Top down approach, the entire assembly is

designed first and individual designs are done latter.

2.Bottom up approach, the component design is

done first and the product is realized by assembling

the components suitably.

The design also will involve preparation of detail drawings.

Engineering the product consists of process planning, tool

design, facility design, capacity planning, quality assurance

activities, procurement, assembly planning, etc.

Marketing department will have the responsibility of carrying

out appropriate product launch activities as well as planning the

sales and service network, advertising and training of sales and

service personnel.
 The product goes through a series of continuous
refinement and improvements, additions etc.

• Example is a software package improved versions of

which are released as new versions at periodic intervals.

• The feedback from the marketing and services leads to

improvements in design and/or evolution of new designs.

As an example, the reader is advised to make a study of

the evolution of the various models of aircraft or passenger
cars over the last five decades.
 SEQUENTIAL ENGINEERING

The traditional product development process at the prototype

development stage is sequential.

It includes

• Product design,

• Development of manufacturing process

• Supporting quality and testing activities, all carried out one after another.
• No interaction among the major departments
involved in product manufacturing during the
initial development process.

• Design department in a typical sequential product

development process finalizes the design without

consulting the manufacturing, quality or purchase

departments.
• Planning might feel it necessary to request design
changes based on a number of reasons like the
procurement or facility limitations.
• Changes in design may be called for when the
manufacturing department is unable to meet design
specifications or there are problems in assembly.
• The design documents are therefore sent back to the
design department for incorporating the changes.
• Lead to inevitable conflicts, each department

sticking to their own decisions and may often

require intervention of senior management to

resolve conflicts or differences in opinion.

• Design changes will involve both material and

time wastages.
• In an age of reduced product life cycles as we

witness today the time delay between market

demand and introduction of product in the market

has to be as short as possible.

• Sequential product development process, therefore,

may not suit the present global scenario.

• R & D group completes the design task and passes

the data to planning, which in turn passes the

information to manufacturing and so on.

• If any downstream department wants to introduce any

change, the process has to backtrack and this often

involves additional expenditure as well as inevitable

delay in realizing the product.

 Sequential Engineering is often called “across
the wall” method.
• Each segment of the product development team
(Design, Planning, Manufacturing etc.) completes
its task in isolation and passes over the
documents to the next segment.
• No interaction among the groups before the
design is finalized.
• If a serious mistake in the product is detected during

testing, the revision process has to start from design,

resulting in materials wastage and loss of time.

• In the context of extensive outsourcing, there is also

need for intensive consultation between vendors

and manufacturers.
 Concurrent engineering

Concurrent engineering or Simultaneous

Engineering is a methodology of restructuring the product

development activity in a manufacturing organization

using a cross functional team approach and is a technique

adopted to improve the efficiency of product design and

reduce the product development cycle time.

Concurrent Engineering brings together a wide spectrum of people from

several functional areas in the design and manufacture of a product.

Representatives from

-R & D,

-Engineering,

-Manufacturing,

-Materials management,

-Quality assurance,

-Marketing etc. develop the product as a team.

• Everyone interacts with each other from the start,
and they perform their tasks in parallel.

Team reviews the design from the :

-Point of view of marketing,

-Process,

-Tool design and procurement,

-Operation,

-Facility and capacity planning,

 -Design for manufacturability,
-Assembly,
-Testing and maintenance,

-Standardization,

-Procurement of components and sub-

assemblies,
-Quality assurance etc as the design.
 co-operation between various specialists and systematic

application of special methods such as

-QFD (Quality Function Deployment),

-DFMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly)

-FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis)

ensures quick optimization of design and early detection

of possible faults in product and production planning.

 COMPARISON OF CONCURRENT ENGINEERING AND SEQUENTIAL
ENGINEERING

• Based on cost is attempted.

• Distribution of the product development cost during the product

development cycle in the below figure.

• 15% of the budget is spent at the time of design completion,

whereas the remaining 85% is already committed.

• Decisions taken during the design stage have an important

bearing on the cost of the development of the product.

• Therefore the development cost and product cost can be reduced

by proper and careful design.
 1. REDUCTION IN THE NUMBER OF DESIGN CHANGES
• The advantage of concurrent engineering over the
traditional sequential (SE) and concurrent
engineering (CE) is that a large number of design
changes are identified and implemented at the
beginning or in the early phase of product
development cycle.
• Every stage of development in the case of
traditional sequential approach.
• The reduction in design change requests with CE is
substantially less at the later stages of the product
development process.
 2. COST OF CHANGES IN DESIGN
• Cost of introducing a design change in a product
progressively increases as the development proceeds
through design and manufacturing.
• Change in the conceptual 3D CAD model costs Rs.50, 000.
• same change during the planning stage would cost Rs.1, 50,000.
• By the time the product moves to prototyping and testing, the
change may cost Rs.2, 50,000.
• The cost goes up to Rs.25,00,000 if the product is in the
manufacturing stage and
• Rs.50,00,000 or more after the company releases the product to
sales and marketing.
 These numbers differ greatly from company

to company and from product to product, they

give a feel of the importance of feedback early in

the design cycle.

COST OF CHANGES IN DESIGN
 3. HOLISTIC APPROACH TO PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT

• Concurrent engineering approach introduces a new

philosophy in product development.

• No longer is product development considered the

exclusive activity of the design department.

Participation of :

Planning,

Manufacturing,

Quality,

Service,

Vendor development and

Marketing personnel in the development process enables the cross functional

team to view the development as a total responsibility and this results in better

communication among the various departments.

 4. ROBUST PRODUCTS

Concurrent approach to product design results in

products with fewer errors, avoids the loss of goodwill
of the customers due to poorly engineered products.
Entire product development team looks at each and
every aspect of products –
-Cost,
-Specifications,
-Aesthetics,
-Ergonomics,
-Performance and
-Maintainability.
The resulting product will naturally satisfy the customer.
 5. REDUCTION IN LEAD TIME FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

• Time compression in product development is an

important issue today.

• Elimination of the errors in design appreciably

reduces the possibility of time overrun, enabling

the development schedule to be maintained.

IMPLEMENTATION OF CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

The cycle of engineering design and

manufacturing planning involves interrelated

activities in different engineering disciplines

simultaneously, than sequentially

 CONCURRENT ENGINEERING AND INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY

Presently, IT vendors offer a variety of tools for

implementing some form of concurrent

engineering.

-The tools can be broken into the following main

technological groups:
• Knowledge based engineering, production tools
and communication tools.
• Relational database management systems for
data management.
• Work flow automation and product life cycle
management (PLM) systems.
• Decision support systems.

• Enterprise resource planning systems.

The concurrent engineering approach can be characterized by the following
factors:
• Integration of product and process development
and logistics support
• Closer attention to the needs of customers
• Adoption of new technologies
• Continuous review of design and development
process
• Rapid and automated information exchange
• Cross functional teams
• Rapid prototyping
 EXAMPLE OF CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

Example for successful implementation of

concurrent engineering is the development of Scooty

moped and other products by TVS Motors Ltd. in

India. Before taking up the design cross functional

teams were formed to design and engineer the product.

 This reduced not only the product development

time but also helped the manufacturer to

introduce the quality product in the market.

KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING THE SUCCESS OF
CE
Successful implementation of CE.

Hewlett Packard is one such example. Its joint venture in Japan,

Yokogawa Hewlett-Packard, reported amazing improvements after
implementing CE.
-Over a five year period, R & D’s cycle time decreased by 35%,

-Manufacturing costs declined 42%,

-Inventory dropped 64% and

-Field failure rates fell by 60%.

-Meanwhile its market share tripled and profits doubled.

 DRAWING INTERCHANGE FILES
It is necessary to export CAD data to other
packages like analysis, CNC programming or other
CAD packages. One way of doing it is using neutral
files STEP, IGES or DXF files.

Figure shows how bi-directional data exchange

between two CAD software packages using neutral
files.
 EXCHANGE OF CAD DATA BETWEEN SOFTWARE
PACKAGES

Necessity to translate drawings created in one

drafting package to another often arises.

For example you may have a CAD model

created in PRO/E package and you may wish that
this might be transferred to I-DEAS or Unigraphics.
It may also be necessary to transfer geometric
data from one software to another.
 This situation arises when you would want to carry out
modelling in one software, say PRO/E and analysis in
another software, say ANSYS.

One method to meet this need is to write direct translators

from one software to another. This means that each system
developer will have to produce its own translators.

This will necessitate a large number of translators. If we

have three software packages we may require six translators
among them.
 A solution to this problem of direct translators is to
use neutral files. These neutral files will have standard
formats and software packages can have pre-processors
to convert drawing data to neutral file and
postprocessors to convert neutral file data to
drawing file.
Figure illustrates how the CAD data transfer is a
accomplished using neutral file. Three types of neutral
files are discussed in this chapter.
• Drawing exchange files (DXF)

• IGES files

• STEP files
 DXF FILES
DXF file (Drawing Exchange File) is a popular
data exchange format adopted by many CAD
system vendors. DXF format is easy to interpret
though it is a lengthy file.