Product Design Category

Customization Approaches:  The Customization Workshop explores best practices in the field of design customization.  Customization focuses on increasing product and service variety while maintaining or improving volume.  Traditionally firms have considered an increase in customization must result in a reduction in volume, which must then result in an increase in price for customers desiring customized products and services.  Various customization approaches have been developed in the last forty years that have enabled companies in many industries to increase variety while decreasing costs.  Participants will examine the approaches and discuss the application of them to their organizations.

Standardization and Simplification:  Standardization benefits an organization in variety of ways: it enables mass production, enables customization, improves supplier coordination, improves quality, enables simplification, enables delayed differentiation and, as a result of many of the other benefits, standardization lowers inventories.  Simplification, a corollary of standardization, investigates reducing the number of standard items a firm uses in its product design and carries in its inventory.  Together, standardization and simplification can vastly improve a product's design while simultaneously reducing costs.

Life Cycle Design Approaches:  The Life Cycle Design Approaches Workshop explores life cycle factors that should be addressed during the design stage of products and services.  Course participants first examine historical life-cycle design approaches.   Then, participants explore how organizations today are integrating Life Cycle Design into their design management systems, such as the Integrated Product Design System.

Integrated Product Development:  The Integrated Product Development Workshop reviews approaches to integrated, concurrent development of a product and its associate processes to satisfy customer needs.  Integrated Product Development refers to the management process that integrates all activities from product concept through production/field support, using a multi-functional team, to simultaneously optimize the product and its manufacturing and sustainable processes to meet cost and performance objectives.  A systems approach using project management techniques and gates will be presented.