This paper assesses the importance of design in determining product costs by measuring the variation in design performance among a set of competing design efforts. This assessment is completed for a set of functionally similar products in a single product category: automatic drip coffee makers. The approach of this study is to measure the manufacturing content---the attributes of the design that drive cost---through analysis of the physical products themselves, and to estimate how variation in manufacturing content relates to variation in cost in a hypothetical manufacturing setting. We call this approach product archaeology. For the domain of coffee makers, we find significant variation in manufacturing content. This variation in manufacturing content corresponds to a range of estimated manufacturing costs, for a hypothetical manufacturing system, of approximately 50 percent of the average manufacturing cost of the products. We also find that differences in capabilities among product development efforts are the most plausible explanation for the differences in manufacturing content.Product Design, Design for Manufacturing, Competitive Benchmarking, Product Development
Design for manufacturing (DFM) has been promoted as a way to enhance product development and production system performance. Current DFM practices encourage the minimization of the number of parts in a design through the physical integration of several geometric features in the same part. While this part integration often reduces the manufacturing cost of the product, it also can extend product development lead time, because complex parts typically require tooling with large lead times. This paper presents an economic model that makes explicit the trade-off between lower unit costs and longer product development time. This model is applied to a particular example in a field study of the application of DFM to Polaroid cameras.product design, product development, design-for-manufacturing, design-for-assembly, lead time, product cost, cost modeling
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