About the Book

Product lifecycles have shortened due to competition, rapidly changing markets, emerging technology, and regulation. Modernizing Product Development Processes: Guide for Engineers provides a foundation to focus on giving engineers, entrepreneurs, and innovators a guide to developing products with a new approach instead of a traditional product development cycle.

Using the fundamental pillars of this book, the authors demonstrate how to bridge the gap in today's product development cycle to improve "time to market" needs in a fast-paced environment. These pillars include:

- Learning from failures and doing
- Harnessing creativity (out-of-the-box thinking)
- Front loading (develop concepts early)
- Explore multiple possible solutions
- Technology/Manufacturing readiness level
- Modularity (integrate common solutions)

In addition, the authors prepare engineers to scale up production to meet customer demands in a dynamic environment by demonstrating how to establish strategies and road maps with a stage gate approach focused on harnessing creativity to build concepts/technologies in early phases.

In today's era of innovation, rapid technological growth, and high consumer demand, engineers must adapt and deliver products with reasonable, engineered solutions and this book shows them how.

Table of Contents:
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Chapter 1
Product Development the Gap 1
Introduction 1
Gaps in Product Development 3
Product Development Steps 5
Business Case 7
Time to Market of New Technology (Speed) 8
Knowledge of the Potential Market 9
Ways We Work Now and New Ways to Meet the Gaps 11
Organization and Process Assets 11
Supporting Learning the Emergent Technology 12
Support Application of the Emergent Tech 12
A Rapidly Changing Environment 13
Adjusting to the Rapidly Changing Environment 14
Areas of Action 16
Limitations of the Traditional Way of Working 16
What Are the Limitations? 17
Generation Dynamics and High Customer Expectations 18
Difference between Customer Expectations and Needs 19
Why Should You Know and Meet the Expectations of Your
Customers? 19
Factors Influencing Customer Expectations 20
How Companies Can Meet Customer Expectations 21
Product Generation Dynamics that Meet High Customer
Expectations 22
Increasing Sensitivity to Customer Needs Changes 22
Reducing the Product Generation Cycle Time 24
Forecasting 25
Conclusion 26
References 27
Contents
vi Contents
Chapter 2
Learning 31
Product Development Is Learning 31
What Is Learning? 32
Benefit of Learning Fast 36
Individual Learning 37
Team Learning 37
Benefits of Team Learning in an Organization 38
Agile Overview 39
Learning Environment 39
Benefits of Controlled Failure 40
Why Push to the Edge Excluding Previously Thought to
Be Constraints? 40
Learning by Discovering Boundaries 40
What We Do Not Know and Assumptions 43
Calculated Risk 43
Experiential Learning 44
Fail Fast 44
Time to Market 46
Failing Is Learning 47
How this Works 47
Delay Deciding 48
Exploration and Experimentation 51
What Do We Know? 51
How Do We Find Out? 51
Biases 52
Simulation and Models 53
Model 56
Design of Experiments 58
References 58
Chapter 3
More Than Engineering 61
Creativity 61
Importance 62
The Myriad of Small Things 67
Platform Thinking 67
Creativity in a Smaller Organization 67
How to Harness Creativity 68
Creative Tools 75
References 82
viiContents
Chapter 4
Front Loading 85
Front-Load the Product Development Process 85
Front Loading Product Development 88
What Does Front-Load Mean? 88
System Dynamics: Investigating Front-Load Effects 89
Customer Involvement 90
Virtual and Augmented Reality Technologies for Product Realization 97
Configuration Management Is a Key Product Management Area
in 3-D Printing 98
Product Performance, Function, and Physical Attributes 99
References 100
Chapter 5
Readiness Level 103
Maturity 103
Technology 104
Concept Decision Matrix 105
Manufacturing Reviews 106
Manufacturing Risk Analysis 108
Manufacturing 4.0 110
Maturity Models 114
Reasons for TRL 117
Technology Readiness Levels 120
TRL and Verification 125
Reasons for MRL 128
Manufacturing Dimensions 130
Manufacturing Readiness Level 132
References 135
Chapter 6
The Right Solution 137
Determine Solution 137
Why Wait? 137
Decision-Making and Risk 139
Build Product Knowledge 140
Set-Based Development and Concurrent Engineering 142
Right Sizing—Right Timing 147
Constraints and Boundary Conditions 149
viii Contents
Product and Manufacturing Evaluation 149
Customer and Product Samples 152
Evaluation Approaches 154
References 158
Chapter 7
Benefits of Multiuse and Reuse 161
Modularity 161
What Is Modularity? 161
Benefits of Modularity 165
Software Modularity 168
Applications of Modularity 168
Road Map and Strategy 169
Establishing Requirements and Boundary Conditions 171
Manufacturability and Serviceability 172
Problem-Solving 174
Improved Quality 176
References 182
Chapter 8
System of Systems 185
Systems Engineering 185
What Is Systems Engineering? 187
Fault Tree Analysis 192
Function Point Analysis 194
Areas of Improvement 195
Integrated Development 197
Compare and Contrast 197
INCOSE 198
Manufacturing 198
Configuration Management 199
Verification and Validation 203
References 206
Index 209
About the Authors 215