Product Development

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

Technology is a key resource of profound importance for corporate profitability and growth. It also has enormous significance for the well-being of national economies as well as international competitiveness. Effective management of technology links engineering, science, and management disciplines to address the issues involved in the planning, development, and implementation of technological capabilities to shape and accomplish the strategic and operational objectives of an organization.

The use of technology is an important factor in the process of a company's product development. Product development is the set of activities beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and ending in the production, sale and delivery of a product. It is often used in engineered, discrete, physical products such as television sets and automobiles. Product development is divided into four stages:

1. Initiation Stage

The goal of the initiation stage is to identify a new business opportunity. Projects go through two phases in this stage: knowledge prebuild, and concept development. At the knowledge prebuild phase, planning groups comprised of marketing and design representatives match market opportunities and available technology. The product manager and the product designer analyze the market potential of the concept and develop draft specifications and plans for project management and investment. Senior corporate and divisional management evaluate the new business opportunity as a cost effective and innovative technological solution that could be developed with sustainable margins on cost, revenues, and technology.

2. Definition Stage

Review of the product concept marks the end of the next major stage in the new product development cycle. During this stage, the product concept is defined, and marketing sets the context within which integration of design and manufacturing occurred. Commercial specification, outlining the functional and aesthetic features of the product, its price range, and its market launch program, including the required launch date are developed. These items act as commercial guideposts around which design and manufacturing engineering designed the product form, fit, and functions.

3. Development Stage

During this stage, the project team develops detailed specifications of what the product is and how it performs, what it looks like, how it is manufactured, and how it is used.

4. Verification Stage

The complete product is assembled by manufacturing, and tested under normal and worst-case conditions in typical customer application environments. The aim is to discover defects early and establish margins for failure modes, so that adjustments could be made as quickly as possible, before the sales and production ramp started. When the product meets the commercial, manufacturability, quality, and performance criteria of the project team, the review panel assesses the readiness to step-up production and ship to customers in volume.

This paper aims to focus on the relation of technology in product development, primarily, the computerized manufacturing planning systems. Almost all modern production systems are implemented using computers. The term computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) has been used to denote the pervasive use of computers to design the products, plan the production, control the operations, and perform the various business related functions needed in a manufacturing firm. CAD/ CAM is another term used synonymously to CIM. Computer-Aided design (CAD) is defined as any activity that involves the effective use of the computer to create, modify, or document an engineering design. It is most commonly associated with the use of interactive computer graphics system. On the other hand, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) is defined as the effective use of computer technology in the planning, management and control of the manufacturing functions. An important link between design and manufacturing in a CAD/CAM system is the computer aided process planning.

Computer-Aided Process Planning

Process planning encompasses the activities and functions to prepare a detailed set of plans and instructions to produce a part. The planning begins with engineering drawings, specifications, parts or material lists and a forecast of demand. The results of the planning are:

* Routings which specify operations, operation sequences, work centers, standards, tooling and fixtures.This routing becomes a major input to the manufacturing resource planning system to define operations for production activity control purposes and define required resources for capacity requirements planning purposes.

* Process plans which typically provide more detailed,step-by-step work instructions including dimensions related to individual operations, machining parameters, set-up instructions, and quality assurance checkpoints.

* Fabrication and assembly drawings to support manufacture (as opposed to engineering drawings to define the part).

Manual process planning is based on a manufacturing engineer's experience and knowledge of production facilities,equipment, their capabilities, processes, and tooling. Process planning is very time-consuming and the results vary based on the person doing the planning.

Over the years, process planning has been improved and computerized. The use of computers to automate the process of preparing the set of detailed work instructions required to manufacture a product is called a Computer-aided Process Planning.

There are two types of CAPP systems:

1. Variant CAPP (Retrieval CAPP)

A process planning system that creates new plans by retrieving and modifying a standard process plan for a given part family. This typically requires input from a human planner.

2. Generative CAPP

A process planning system, including a database and decision logic that will automatically generate a process plan from graphical and textual information on the part. Generative process planners should create a new process plan, without the use of any existing plans. This does not imply that the process planner is automatic.

Variant Process Planning

Most successful variant systems depend upon Group Technology(GT). The basic variant approach to process planning with GT is:

1. Go through normal GT setup