All 1 entries tagged Peuss

RE–DESIGNING the Design

MBE always keeps on exciting me. I have had quite a few product design experiences in the manufacturing industry. But I realize now that most of the design specefications that I was part of were merely assumptions. WE have never followed a structured process of designing the product. Without trying the new approaches, I would never know the importance of following the structured process of listening to the voice of the customer. I came across two tools namely the FMECA and the Fault tree analysis. FMECA was a very structured approach. It can be very structured approach in finding the possible failures in the product. The overall ideology is that design the product to perfection in the initial stage so that there are no inflated costs in the manufacturing stage in case of defects in design. The FMECA tools helps to achieve this ideology. We start off by looking at the product failures such as breaking of the shoe sole pasting. The possible effect of this thing would be development of rashes on the feet of the customer. The cause for such a failure mode will be due to the unskilled pasting by equipment. Such a analysis of the whole product helps the manufacturer understand better the design of the product and related training needs attached with the product. This presents a complete story of the processes and the design of the product to the manufacturer. The important part is to rank the most important causes using the Severity, Occurence and detection rating. This will help the designer know exactly which place to focus on and where to work upon. The second tool was also very interesting one to follow. It is the Fault Tree Analysis. The loophole I found in this approach was that it is diificult to use before designing the product. The faults are found out and analysis is done when there is a design of product in hand. So for me it doesn't really click too much in terms of designing the product. No doubt it is a good approach and tool to find the various causes of failures. I have found Quality Function Deployment as a very effective tool and appraoch in terms of designing the product and New Product development. The voice of customer plays a very important role in the approach. Just make what customer wanrs. QFD gives us a systematic approach to know what the customer wants. The interesting part was to use the the results in QFD to determine the competitive advantage of the product from the customer perspective and the areas of improvement as well. Basically what these tools do really well is that they present the whole story of customer requirement /design/ failure modes/ process failures in front of the manufacturer or service provider in a graphical and easy viewable form. Glancing at them helps to take better decisions with respect to the requirements. But the important point to be noted is that, it is necessary to perform these functions correctly in order to make correct decisions. Any mistakes in the data collection process or any form of bias can lead to ineffective application of these tools.

Saurabh Kukreja : 05 Feb 2019 22:28 |  Tags: Management Mbe Peuss |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem