Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management Deputy Dean Steven Eppinger, whose textbook Product Design and Development is used by university students all over the world, recently identified and discussed with Eng-Tips.com what he sees as the top six trends and innovations in product development.

His list of trends, based on a transcript from the recent Eng-Tips.com interview:

• Development Speed occurs more quickly through digital design, analysis and collaboration tools to get products to market faster. Using computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), collaboration software, file-sharing software and more, engineers can transform ideas into digitized virtual designs for testing and viewing a new product in three dimensions.

This isn’t new. However, the future that Prof. Eppinger highlights entails customizing off-the-shelf programs to make a company’s development methods “work with their own processes.” When linked with 3D printing or rapid prototyping, product development can move from concept to prototype in months rather than years. (See Design Collaboration and the Mad Dash to Product Launch and Solve the CAD File Exchange Problem)

• Platform Flexibility results from using modular product architecture to provide more product variety to customers. CAD and CAE permit easy reuse of already-completed design files. In addition to archived files within a company’s server, design engineers can search for free CAD files offered by some publishers and suppliers. All these files make product design much more efficient, cost effective and accelerated than ever before.

Some industrial pundits believe we are entering an age of mass customization so the reuse of CAD files will become increasingly crucial to compete successfully. “The platforms can be used to create derivative products so that in development of the future derivative products, those can be much less costly and much more quickly developed,” says Eppinger. (See Reuse Design Or Start from Scratch? and — self-promotion alert! — CAD models at ThomasNet)

• Complexity Management involves engineering complex systems through analysis of interaction networks. Research has resulted in network modeling methods to examine a network of interacting elements that are in complex systems being developed. The challenge of engineering complex systems with many components is sometimes called systems engineering, Eppinger notes. “Some of the newest tools that are emerging are helping us come up with the right system architectures ... to manage the network of interaction,” he adds. (See Profiting from Innovation Now)

• Outsourcing and Offshoring permit optimizing supplier skills and capacity, international operations and new markets. “What I found [with outsourcing and offshoring is that] sometimes it saves cost – not actually a whole lot of cost, but more importantly, they're actually taking advantage of global product development networks, largely to access new markets in places in the world where they’d like to operate and sell their products, as well as to access talent that is in those different parts of the world. And they want access to those specific types of engineers, or people that understand the markets in those regions. So there’s a variety of reasons why this is happening, and it’s just an important tool that has to be used carefully and not just moved into with blinders,” explains Eppinger. (See Offshoring: Today and Tomorrow and Tips for Outsourcing Success)

• Lean Principles allow for improving product development’s efficiency by applying lean production ideas to the organization’s design process. Small to midsized manufacturers’ products may be just as complex as those of large manufacturers, but because they simply do not have the infrastructure to support product development, “employing lean product development principles allows the product development stakeholders to eliminate wasteful activities, activities they can ill afford to support,” according to an Aberdeen Group report in mid-2007. Lean during product design involves cutting out waste and focusing on efficiency of the design process and the steps throughout.

There are many ways to speed development and do it in less costly ways, according to Eppinger. For instance, overloading engineers with too many projects at once is a form of waste, he noted. The work piles up as inventory when engineers start more jobs than can be finished in the allotted time. “And as a result, much less gets done than could if” management had loaded the engineers “with much less work in the first place.” (See Is Your Lean LAME? and Nimble Product Design Determines SME Value)

• Customer Involvement becomes more easily achieved by using the Internet to bring customers’ ideas into the product design process. Some companies are “using the order information about what features, components or configurations customers are ordering and are interested in, and they use that in real time, or as quickly as possible, to reconfigure the next generations of the product,” Eppinger aptly notes.

Paying attention to these trends can help managers and design engineers plan their product design processes and achieve their goals with higher efficiency, lower cost and less time to market. Many customers and consumers won’t see the technology, but they’ll enjoy the results.

Resource

Trends and Innovations in Product Development (Podcast Transcript)
by Steven Eppinger
MIT Sloan Executive Education, March 12, 2008