Development Concurrent Engineering : Product Design Evaluation

The design development, and production of a product is one of the greatest challenges which flexible manufacturing systems face today. No matter how a company refines and controls the manufacturing process, if the product is not properly designed, it will not operate correctly or performed well. Therefore the focus on quality of design must be balanced. One such strategy certain to address the managerial and manufacturing of the future is concurrent engineering. Concurrent engineering calls for the consideration and inclusion of product design attributes satisfying all the design constraints such as customer requirements. Furthermore, concurrent engineering has been recently promoted in many industries as a response to competitive marketing pressures. Viewed as a systematic approach of creating high quality products and bringing them to market at lower cost and in significantly less time, it also attracts the attention of quality designers. In this paperm a methodology and model for optimizing the product design, especially selection of optimal design alternative, is developed. The focus of this paper is on product design as the most critical activity of concurrent engineering. The model is based on the customer requirements for quality. Customer requirements for a certain product can be grouped based on the various design attributes. The design attributes have the priorities. The number of design functions. Design attributes value are calculated, however these values are applied to the optimization method. Numerical example will be illustrated.