All entries for January 2014

Better Coffee!

Most of the WMG student wants to get good coffee from vending machines in common room. However, even coffee machine works properly, it doesn’t provide good coffee. The coffee is all watery and does not have good taste and proper coffee feel to it. This issue was raised in SSLC meeting, but wasn’t solved. Actually we could get good coffee from Digital Lab Building; however, this week it is prohibited by unknown people. All in all we request WMG to provide us good coffee in common room, at least provide the same coffee machine as the one in IDL. Support us and intensify our voice!

Here is the link to support:

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/wmg-students-we-the-students-request-better-quality-coffee-for-students-in-the-common-room

: 22 Jan 2014 18:25 |  Tags: Coffee Wmg |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

DesignX and Case Study

After one week break, it was a good beginning with Design for X. Design for X can be seen as a design for everything such as design for manufacturability or design for environment. For instance, if we assume that we are dealing with a project which is about manufacturing a water pump. We can categorize our design aims into different categories just I did as above. Actually this module provides us how much design has a role or impact on innovation. Yes, I will call it innovation! DesignX looks the project from different perspectives of views. For instance, not only covering the issues about serviceability or reliability of product in future, but also may include design for environment. Actually, DesignX wants to show that designing a product is not just manufacturing the product, but also being ready to following issues.

In today’s case study was about an aircraft crash in 1989. As a mechanical engineer, I exited about both today’s topic and case study, because I am very familiar with this topic and I have been doing this kind of analysis more than 5 years. The video showed us that due to explosion at the tail engine, hydraulic system was lost. With pilot’s outstanding exertion, 185 people were survived surprisingly, even 111 people died.

According to our team’s great investigation and my interpretation, due to lack of know-how of one more vacuuming process which is called triple-vacuum process in the beg-70s, the melted titanium reacted with air and had impurities in its micro-structure. These impurities caused cracks on the edge of fan disk which could be seen minor issues on those days, when the engine was freshly manufactured by GE. However, cracks can propagate over time due to fluctuating pressure levels and then reduced the strength of parts furtively. Even though engineers estimated fatigue life (useful life) of engine 25, it suddenly exploded in 17^th year and gave damage to hydraulic system. Second major design failure was that there was no back-up hydraulic system that can be operated in case of emergency. Actually, nowadays aircraft are supposed to be checked by ultrasonic devices in order to prevent any fatigue problems and the aircrafts have 3 have hydraulic systems.

: 20 Jan 2014 21:35 |  Tags: Casestudy Dfss Peuss Ua232 Warwick Wmg |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Matrix for choosing the best suited business tablet/laptops

After we learned the QFD method in product excellence with using Six Sigma module, I was considering about how I can use it in my individual life. Actually, I have been dealing hard times deciding to buy a new tablet/laptop/ultrabook (whatever it is), after I met the awesome product which is Microsoft Surface Pro 2!! By the way, I was using my current one more than 6 years. However, in order to choose the best one, I checked other brand's collection like “Asus-Taichi” as well.

After I watched hundreds of reviews on YouTube, I eliminate other opportunities and focus on Microsoft Surface pro 2 and MacBook air. Then, I made a matrix on Excel. Although I wanted to do QFD, it doesn’t make sense to me due to irrelevancy between choosing a notebook and complex design tool (QFD). However, I have influenced from Paul's speech on class, and prepared a matrix.

Steps of Matrix:

1) Wrote down my criteria such as CPU performance

2) Determined the significance levels of each criteria according to me

3) Compared the two products with respect to criteria

4) Calculate the overall score

My expected criteria from business product are "price, CPU performance, Video Card Performance, RAM, Touch Screen, Ease of design with Pen, Portability, Estimated Durability, Battery life, Resolution."

And here is the matrix:

ultrabook_comparison.xlsx

Consequently, the overall scores are almost same; however Surcafe Pro 2 get higher score than MacBook Air.

Guys please write your own feedbacks and experiences about this topic, I need it. Thanks!

: 16 Jan 2014 23:50 |  Tags: Apple Macbookair Microsoft Microsoftblog Microsoftsurfacepro2 Surfacecomparison Surfacepro2 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reflections about QFD

Even though I feel a bit late to express my ideas about QFD (Quality Function Deployment) due to pma, I am still exited to start a new module.

I want to tell my opinions about QFD. I believe that QFD is very common; but not widely used. I never heard anything about QFD before the class on Tuesday. 80% of cost of new product development comes from designing a suitable product, developing it, and testing it. If the designer team could not handle producing suitable products for their focused customer, the product will disappear in short-time as other cases. (Paul told that 7 out of 10 products do not succeed!)

I believe that the most distinctive QFD feature is more customer-based than other tools. The engineering criteria are chosen with respect to customer anticipations and also QFD shortens the time to provide all of the elements on the sheet. I can continue explaining every features, it might take hundreds of page and dozens of days to cover one by one.

Let’s talk deeply about QFD

Customer Requirements which are clearly seen on the left side of chart might be especially gathered from feedback data or anticipations, and they are categorized according to significance level. With respect to those elements, management team and engineers have to meet (I know this part is the hardest!) and decide the engineering norms which is seen at the product design requirements. With the expected commitment, they decide all of the product design requirements. On the very right side of the chart, QFD compares the other rival products according to customer expectations and evaluates, so the team can understand the product’s drawback and benefit quicker and can enhance easily. This will surely save them a lot of money because they are starting from even before creating something which saves a lot of money. On the top matrix, in order to determine the trade-off between criteria QFD shows the interrelations between product design requirements. One of the important rows is technical difficulty and technical evolution.

Also it seems it seems when comparing this tool to taguchi, QFD is more concerned with more aspects, such as engineering requirement, competitors in the market, and the importance of quality, while taguchi is mainly focus on the financial aspects.

: 12 Jan 2014 04:34 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

First impressions about Design for Six Sigma

Even though the DFSS and original Six Sigma sound like similar terms, there are several differences between them. The Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) module is more end user based than Six Sigma, because Six Sigma aims to get rid of variability and incapability in the system and cares more about internal issues in the business. However, DFSS captures the wide perspective of market. Although it is stated in many sources that DFSS is product based, I don’t agree that it is simply product based because products are purchased by customers and they should be designed with respect to customers’ desires and beliefs, just as how we were taught in our Creating Busıness Excellence course. Paul Roberts wrote in class: “product and customer” on the board, and asked which one king is. Then he said that CUSTOMER is the KING! Customers have a free will and they can buy whatever they want, though the product is foolish! Even your product may be the most qualified product ever on the market or the most innovated, in some cases it doesn’t work!

However, DFSS catches and interprets customer feedbacks or thoughts, and then produces a new product according to the design X approach. Design for reliability, and maintainability are the subgroups of designX.

Lastly, I am enthusiastic about PEUSS and glad to have 1 week break :) Now we should read and prepare for the lecture week!

: 10 Jan 2014 19:09 |  Tags: Dfss Mbe Peuss Wmg |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem