| motivated to improve the quality and profitability of their products. It is also for students who wish to improve their product design skills by developing improved understanding and insight into the complex relationship that exists between quality, cost, and productivity and how this relationship is influenced and often irreversibly fixed by product design. The book is unique in that it focuses directly on the relationship between manufacturability, quality, and design and on how to improve manufacturability and quality by design. It provides structured methodologies and practices that can be put into immediate use by product development teams. It also presents an integrated overall view of product development, design for manufacture, quality engineering, and associated best management practices and serves as a basic reference. |
| As a product designer, I have always believed that there are certain underlying design principles, which, if properly applied, will result in a design that is inherently robust and easy to manufacture. Similarly, I believe that there are certain design methods and practices that are particularly useful in helping the design team to do good design. One of my goals in writing this book has been to pull these ideas and approaches together into some sort of organized and useful form. They have been gathered from many sources and, in some cases, they have been enriched, adapted, and modified. I have made no attempt to create an exhaustive list of design principles or to present a comparative study of all available design methods and in this sense, the book represents my personal view of the subject. In keeping with this approach, the design methods and practices presented are not cast in concrete and I would hope that the reader will, in the spirit of continuous improvement, feel free to enrich, adapt, and modify them as needed to better serve specific design needs and organizational cultures. |
| Since becoming involved in product development and design for manufacture, I have been fortunate to have worked with and been exposed to the ideas of many people from industry and academia. Much of my original thinking was developed while I was at the Industrial Technology Institute (ITI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which provided an excellent learning environment in which to evolve and test new ideas and approaches to product design. While at Square D Company, I had the opportunity to try out many of the ideas discussed in this book and to see positive benefits resulting from their use. My close association with colleagues at Northwestern University and the Evanston office of IDEO Product Development has also helped to mature my understanding of the product development process. Finally, there is no doubt that my thinking has been indelibly shaped by the many excellent articles and books that have been published on this subject. |
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