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Chapter 4 • Product Design

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• Internet Exercises • Weblinks

QUESTIONS
4-1. Describe the strategic significance of design. How can organizations gain a competitive edge with product or service design? 4-2. Look around your classroom and make a list of items that impede your ability to learn. Classify them as problems in quality of design or quality of conformance. 4-3. Give an exampleof a product or service you have encountered that was poorly designed. Read about more bad designs at the bad designs Web site http://www.baddesigns.com. Make a list of the factors that make a design unworkable. 4-4. Sometimes failures provide the best opportunities for new products and services. Read the Post-It Note story at http://www.3m.com. Search the Net for at least one otherfailure-to-success story. 4-5. BusinessWeek sponsors a best design competition each year. Read about this year’s winners and write a brief summary about what makes these designs special. 4-6. Automakers often post concept cars on their Web sites. Find out how the design process for these cars differs. Which cars do you think will be commercially successful? Why? 4-7. Construct a perceptual map for the followingproducts or services: (a) business schools in your state or region, (b) software packages, and (c) video rental stores. Label the axes with the dimensions you feel are most relevant. Explain how perceptual maps are used. 4-8. Read about benchmarking at the American Productivity and Quality Center http://www.apqc.org and the Benchmarking Exchange http://www.benchnet.com. What is benchmarking? Whattypes of things do these organizations benchmark? How are the studies conducted? If possible, access one of the free benchmarking reports and summarize its findings. 4-9. Find out if your university benchmarks itself against other universities. If so, write a summary of the characteristics that are considered, the measures that are used, and the results. Do the data support your views as acustomer? 4-10. What kinds of analyses are conducted in a feasibility study for new products? 4-11. Differentiate between performance specifications, design specifications, and manufacturing specifications. Write sample specifications for a product or service of your choosing. 4-12. How are reliability and maintainability related? Give an example for a product or service you have experienced. 4-13. Explainhow simplification and standardization can improve designs. How does modular design differ from standardization? 4-14. How can design teams improve the quality of design? Relate your experiences in working in teams. What were the advantages and disadvantages? 4-15. Discuss the concept of concurrent design. What are the advantages of this approach? How would you apply concurrent design to a groupproject? 4-16. What does design for manufacture entail? List several techniques that can facilitate the DFM process. 4-17. Describe the objectives of failure mode and effect analysis, fault tree analysis, and value analysis. Apply one of the techniques to a project, computer assignment, or writing assignment you have recently completed. 4-18. Access the Environmental Protection Agency http://www.epa.gov/ to read about the U.S. government’s commitment to environmental product design. Compare the U.S. approach to that of other countries. 4-19. Search the Internet for two or more companies that design for environment. What are the main components of each company’s green design initiative? How do their approaches differ? 4-20. Link to the International Standards Organization http:// www.iso.organd explore ISO 14000. What do these standards entail? How were they developed? How does a company attain ISO 14001 certification? Why would they want to? 4-21. What is the purpose of QFD? Find out if companies really use QFD by visiting the QFD Institute http://www.qfdi.org and summarizing one of their case studies. 4-22. Discuss the concept of robust design. Give an example of a robust product...