ROLE OF DESIGN-PHILOSOPHIES IN INTERFACING MANUFACTURING WITH MARKETING

Product design involves the mapping of a product's marketing attribute s to its engineering and manufacturing features. In practice, it is a non-trivial task for design engineers to determine an appropriate mapp ing between a product's marketing and manufacturing attributes so as t o generate a product design that satisfies customer-needs while being feasible to produce within the technical and financial constraints of the firm's manufacturing domain. In this paper, we hypothesize that in a mature industry, the expertise that guides designers in this mappin g process exists in the form of an engineering design-philosophy that governs the design of products in that industry. Clearly, if we are ab le to discern the design-philosophies that exist in an industry, they can then be used to channel designers' creativity to be congruent with the commercial objectives of firms in that industry, Using real-world data from the automobile industry, we show the existence of design-ph ilosophies and illustrate methodologies for identifying and interpreti ng them. We also describe predictive models that allow managers to exp loit the knowledge available in these design-philosophies and accurate ly specify a new product's manufacturing attribute values, given marke t input regarding the product's desired features. This total approach should save firms valuable product designing time and enable them to g enerate products that can be successfully produced and sold. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.