Probabilistic Design for Optimization and Robustness for Engineers

1 New product development process

1.1 Introduction

The development of new products is a major competitive issue as consumers continuously demand new and improved products. One outcome of this competitive landscape is the need for shorter product life cycles while still achieving ever increasing expectations for product quality and performance measures. This has required companies to significantly enhance their capabilities to better identify true customer wants, translate them into quantifiable product functional requirements, quickly develop, evaluate, and integrate new design concepts to meet them, and then effectively bring these concepts to market through new product offerings.

Several companies (e.g., Apple, General Electric (GE), Samsung, Toyota, General Motors (GM), Ford) have made great strides improving the effectiveness of new product development. For example, many companies have created processes to quickly gather voice of the customer information via surveys, customer clinics, or other sources. Samsung, for instance, has a well-designed system of scorecards and tool application checklists to manage risk and cycle time from the voice of the customer through the launch of products that meet customer and business process demands (Creveling et al., 2003). In addition, advances in computer simulation and modeling techniques permit manufacturers to evaluate many design concept alternatives, thereby resolving many potential problems at minimal costs. This also allows one ...