scholarly journals TOOLS FOR RECORDING PROTOTYPING ACTIVITIES AND QUANTIFYING CORRESPONDING DOCUMENTATION IN THE EARLY STAGES OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3159-3168
Author(s):  
Sohail Ahmed Soomro ◽  
Yazan A M Barhoush ◽  
Zhengya Gong ◽  
Panos Kostakos ◽  
Georgi V. Georgiev

AbstractPrototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 531-540
Author(s):  
Albert Albers ◽  
Miriam Wilmsen ◽  
Kilian Gericke

AbstractThe implementation of agile frameworks, such as SAFe, in large companies causes conflicts between the overall product development process with a rigid linkage to the calendar cycles and the continuous agile project planning. To resolve these conflicts, adaptive processes can be used to support the creation of realistic target-processes, i.e. project plans, while stabilizing process quality and simplifying process management. This enables the usage of standardisation methods and module sets for design processes.The objective of this contribution is to support project managers to create realistic target-processes through the usage of target-process module sets. These target-process module sets also aim to stabilize process quality and to simplify process management. This contribution provides an approach for the development and application of target-process module sets, in accordance to previously gathered requirements and evaluates the approach within a case study with project managers at AUDI AG (N=21) and an interview study with process authors (N=4) from three different companies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1017-1026
Author(s):  
G. O. Mueller ◽  
C. A. Bertram ◽  
N. H. Mortensen

AbstractEngineer-To-Order (ETO) companies develop complex one-of-a-kind products based on specific customer demands. Given the product uniqueness, the commissioning plays an important role in the product development process. However, the project variety and low data availability hinder the analysis of the commissioning processes. This paper proposes a framework for the structured analysis of commissioning processes in ETO companies by analysing the impacts from product requirements and design on the commissioning performance. A case study presents the practical application of the developed framework.


Author(s):  
Beverly Becker ◽  
Nanxin Wang

Automotive product development is a lengthy and complex process. There exists a large body of various requirements, standards, and regulations, which need to be followed by all engineering activities throughout the entire vehicle development process. The underlying relationships between these requirements are very complicated. Although most of engineering requirements can be found in various engineering databases, it is the lack of the underlying relationship between the requirements and their association with the design that makes it extremely difficult for even experienced engineers to follow the requirements in their dayto-day work. This paper introduces an Engineering Requirements Management Method (ERMM) that captures these interrelationships and associations using a matrix-based representation. A case study with a real automotive component is also presented.


Author(s):  
Mohamed E. M. El-Sayed ◽  
Jacqueline A. J. El-Sayed

Product realization, which is the goal of any product development process from concept to production, usually means bringing a product to physical reality. Problem solving and design are two of the engineering activities for achieving the product development process goal. For this reason engineering education efforts are usually focused on problem solving as a building block for any educational course or program activities. In addition, some courses and curriculum threads are usually dedicated to design education and practices. The common restriction of realization to mean physical reality, however, limits the full understanding and potential of better problem solving and design education in engineering. In this paper, the realization process is expanded to include the virtual and perceptual realities as valid domains of the product realization process. These domains of realization and their interactions with the physical reality are studied. Also, the relationships between research, problem solving, and design are examined in the context of engineering product realization. Focus, in this study, is directed to the understanding of research, engineering problem solving, and design activities as a result of the expanded realization concept. This understanding aims at improving engineering education by focusing on the key issue of creativity in program and course design, delivery, and assessment. To illustrate the concepts, presented in the paper, several examples are included.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 908-927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Madzík

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a structured procedure for the capture and evaluation of innovative ideas in the early stages of product development. The procedure is designed to take account of internal and external factors affecting the value of innovative ideas. Design/methodology/approach The proposed procedure is based on divergent and convergent approaches to innovation. Ideas are generated and captured using targeted questions and subsequently evaluated using modifications of the Kano model and failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). Idea evaluation considers four criteria – delight, originality, market share potential and simplicity – which are used to compute an “idea priority number”. Findings A case study looking at innovations in swimming goggles verified the validity of the proposed procedure. The procedure also supports fact-based decision making and applies a structured perspective to the innovation process that makes it easier to manage. Research limitations/implications The case study made use of a pilot survey in which 32 customers participated. Although the case study was only intended as a demonstration of the method’s use, such a sample size could lead to unreliable results in certain cases. Originality/value Applications of standard or expanded FMEA do not add value to a product because the main purpose of the approach is to prevent failure. The proposed inversion of FMEA logic combined with customer view via the Kano model offers a method for the structured analysis of product innovations. No similar approach to the evaluation of innovations has so far appeared in the literature.


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