Chapter 3: Product Design and Process Selection
Topics: Vertical integration, Design / Pages: 6 (1371 words) / Published: Sep 14th, 2012

Chapter 3: Product Design and Process Selection

Answers to Assigned Discussion Questions in Textbook

1. Define product design and explain its relationship to business strategy.

Product design is the process of determining all the features and characteristics of a product or service. The design of the product or service must match the business strategy in order for the company to be successful. For example, if we create a product with numerous features, it would probably be more expensive to produce. This would not help us if our goal is to provide a low cost product.

2. What are the differences between product and service design?

Recall that the key differences between manufacturing and service is the fact that manufacturing creates a tangible product, while services typically do not, and that services involve the customer. Service design is more complicated because we must not only design the service itself, but also the entire service concept.

3. Explain the meanings of benchmarking and reverse engineering.

Benchmarking involves the usage of information gathered from world class companies in order to improve your company’s performance. Reverse engineering is the study of an actual product by disassembling it to determine how it was created.

4. Explain the meaning of design for manufacture (DFM) and give some examples.

DFM is a set of guidelines for ensuring that a product is easy to produce profitably. DFM involves reducing the number of parts in a product and the use of common and interchangeable parts.

5. Describe the stages of the product life cycle. What are the demand characteristics at each stage?

The four stages of the product life cycle are introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Introduction is the stage where the product is introduced to the market and starts to sell. The demand is slowly growing in this stage. Growth is the stage where demand takes off. Maturity is the stage when the demand has

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