Design Agility: Increasing your Ability to Adapt to Change

By BARB SCHMITZ | Published: DEC 13, 2011

One of the most prominent trends in today’s markets is the reality that the customer is now king. Consumers are demanding ever more innovative products that are tailored specifically to their needs, dictating the types of features and functionality they require, and as a result, are driving the direction of many different types of products.

As the result, the ability to respond quickly to changes is key to surviving in today’s turbulent and competitive markets, whether you’re making cars, cell phones or other consumer products. Bottom line: Product design today must be agile, iterative, and flexible. Manufacturers must strive to offer greater product customization or variety, but continue to keep unit costs low.

Another factor that increases the need for design agility is the prevalence of collaborative design. Product design now requires input from many divergent groups within a company, including sales and marketing, logistics, accounting and finance, manufacturing, engineering, Quality, and possibly even customers and suppliers. These collaborative team members weigh in and offer input throughout all the various stages of design—from concept through to production—so the ability to respond to change requests quickly, nimbly and continuously is essential.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” –Charles Darwin

Design agility, by definition, is a manufacturer’s ability to react quickly to sudden, unpredicted changes in customer demands or market changes for products. Flexibility is essential to respond to changes that are inevitable during the development cycle as customers change their minds, markets shift, and new technologies arise. Design agility requires that manufacturers design products that can either be quickly evolved or can be customized to meet customers’ specified requirements and changes in the market.

Companies can increase their ability to respond to such changes in product requirements bydeveloping families of products (often referred to as product platforms) that are designed for modularity and reconfigurability. These modular product structures enable manufacturers to adapt a product late in the design cycle or in manufacturing—or even in distribution—to better suit the needs of an individual consumer with as little disruption as possible.

By doing so, they are better able to quickly respond to changing market conditions or customer requests by making slight modifications to base or modular designs to create newly customized products. Manufacturers also need to be able to reconfigure processes or systems to accommodate sudden changes in product designs.

Product development processes can decrease flexibility

Many strategies put in place to foster product innovation may actually thwart manufacturers’ efforts to increase design agility. Phased product development processes that emphasize heavy up-front planning coupled with established project management methodologies promote an organized plan-your-work, work-your-plan approach to product design.

At the beginning, the project has complete flexibility but by the end of the initial planning or concept phase, the project budget, schedule and product requirements (design intent) are established and approved. From here on, the design process has restricted flexibility. While these approaches have their advantages, they can also make it difficult to make changes midstream in development.

While last-minute design changes are inevitable, this staged approach requires designers and engineering to anticipate what those changes might be during the planning phase. While this approach keeps design projects on schedule and within budget, it can also hamper the design team’s ability to deal with design changes as they arise, which can often be later in the design cycle.

Parametric modelers can facilitate design agility by making it easier to deal with last-minute product changes. When designs are created in a history-based parametric CAD system, the user can make a requested change, and then leverage the model’s parametric interdependencies to propagate changes throughout the rest of the model. If, however, the user making the change doesn’t understand the underlying model structure or if the change lies outside the tolerable parametric ranges, issues can arise. Often this requires engineers to start from scratch.

Direct modeling systems can make it much easier to deal with these last-minute design changes. With direct modelers, users can make changes to the model at any time, though design intent can be lost. A hybrid approach that utilizes both parametric and direct modeling tools can help design teams by providing them with flexibility and the design intelligence provided by parametric interdependencies.

Unraveling the Complexity of Today’s Products

By BARB SCHMITZ | Published: NOV 16, 2011

Nearly every product today, from cars and phones to washing machines, contains some sort of embedded computing technology. Customers are increasingly yearning for technology-enabled products. Smart phones, computing tablets, electronic navigation systems, Wi-Fi-enabled TVs, and a slew of other tech-enabled products offer consumers convenience, portability, and personalization at very reasonable prices, thanks to increased competition among manufacturers.

Consider these daunting statistics. Over the past five years, the average number of tech-enabled engine control units in new vehicles has grown from 20 to 80. In the mobile phone industry, the number of IT-based updates per year is approximately 40, double the number from 2000.

As the complexity of products increase, so does the task of developing them. The mounting pressure to cut time to market while also keeping prices low adds to the challenges faced by manufacturers worldwide today.   The growing demand for these tech-heavy products creates a struggle for manufacturers who are trying to keep costs low amid fast-evolving technologies and the continual pressure for product upgrades.

Traditional product development was driven largely by hardware considerations. Today’s complex products are dependent upon the effective integration of multiple hardware and software components. Software design involves strings of code that are pieced together in interconnected layers. The IT architecture underlying new product designs today, therefore, is much more complex. In products that are controlled by on-board microprocessors, sensors and processors guide their function, not mechanical components.

Manufacturers accustomed to managing the development of their hardware need to learn new processes and metrics for managing the development of software. Hardware typically involves much less uncertainty about how the components of a system work together: something connects or it doesn’t. Software development involves shades of gray. Because embedded development requires expertise in software and in hardware engineering and physics, best practice includes the use of cross-functional teams of experts and development methodologies that apply common models and simulation tools.

Successfully developing these tech-enabled, complex products requires an integrated approach that addresses a number of important characteristics. The architecture should be modular in nature, allowing sections to be stored and applied in different or future products. It should be built on standards, providing for easier integration, and be configurable so one system can meet many different customer requirements. Finally, it should be updatable, allowing new features and functions to added without having to discard large parts of previous releases.

Product development teams creating complex products should continually look for ways to simplify designs. Ask if a certain desired feature is something that customers would use regularly. If not, consider leaving it out. If the design seems overly complex, teams should not be afraid to start over and determine if the design can be streamlined to reduce its complexity. This not only decreases developments costs and design cycle time, but can also reduce the complexity of using the product. If a product is too complex and the learning curve is to high, adoption will be low.

Efficient and effective collaboration among those tasked with developing these complex products—engineering, marketing, concept design, and others—is critically important. This interaction helps IT-and engineering development teams balance what the market demands in a feature set against what the business side requires in costs and cycle times—and keeping it all within the realm of what’s technically possible.

Close collaboration also helps to anticipate where design changes might occur since changes made to one portion of complex multi-dimensional designs have ripple effects that can affect adjacent portions. Carefully and collaboratively organizing the architecture of these designs is vital to isolating the effects of design changes. By involving all those who are likely to initiate changes in the design—sales, marketing, purchasing, Quality, manufacturing, and engineering—you can help predict where those design changes will occur and design the underlying product architecture accordingly.

Because of the great complexity involved in the design of these tech-enabled products, the implementation of a product lifecycle management (PLM) system is vital. PLM systems help organizations by managing the interdependencies of these various subsystems (software and hardware) on each other, facilitating the collaboration between the multiple disciplines involved in the design, and tracking the change process.

Image  by Tom Held

Creo Customer: System Group Saves Cardboard, World

By LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN | Published: DEC 8, 2011

A few weeks ago, The Product Design Show introduced viewers to 4Phases, a machine that packages tiles, bottles, and cans. Engineered by Creo customer, System Group, this industrial machine cuts the cardboard, prints the label, glues everything together, and packs the product inside.

In the video, Vince and Allison talk about many benefits of 4Phases, but I’d like to underline one in particular: Waste reduction.

Compared to a traditional packaging machine, 4Phases uses up to 80% less cardboard to box up a stack of tiles. According to Ceramic World, “If just 10% of the annual world ceramic tile production of 8.5 million square metres was packaged using this system, it would bring savings of 100 million square metres of cardboard in a year.”

That’s a big deal, especially in System’s home town of Fiorano Modenese, Italy. This past October, the municipality gave System its District Green Economy award, Green Technology category.

System Group is a global company with several divisions, including logistics, photonics, ceramics, and electronics. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about the company, and The Product Design Show is already working on a second show on this diverse machinery company. Until then, congratulations to System Group for your well-deserved recognition!

Creo Customers: Innovative PCs and Laptops Come to Life

By GEOFF HEDGES | Published: JUL 19, 2011

When PTC holds its customer events, I’m always intrigued by the number of participants and the diversity of roles and jobs they fill. Maybe you are too. That’s why I love these man-on-the-street  or, rather, engineer-at-the-trade-show vignettes. Let’s face it, you and I can’t easily interrupt busy strangers in conference hallways and ask them what they do and how–but our camera crews can!

In this video, we hear from a 15-year veteran of Creo Parametric. He works for a Fortune Global 500 company, headquartered in China, that designs and manufactures PCs and laptops. His company is one of the world’s largest makers of personal computers and makes the world’s most innovative PCs. Find out how he uses Creo unlock value in his highly competitive, fast-paced industry.

Creo Customers: Military Helicopters Stay Airborne with Creo

By GEOFF HEDGES | Published: JUN 17, 2011

In the action movies, military helicopters are the stars of all the airborne excitement. We see them swerve around tall buildings in chases, swoop in to deliver or rescue troops in inhospitable terrain, and, sometimes, even take a dramatic hit from ground fire. What we never see, however, are the guys who come along later, laptops at their side, to fix the battered machines—guys like Troy Moser.  

In real life, military helicopters ferry troops, project power, drop off supplies, carry out medical evacuations, and serve numerous other purposes. And, in real life, they can take on some damage. When that happens, teams come in to repair and modify the helicopters in the field—since it’s impractical to send aircraft back to the manufacturer.

Troy Moser is a project engineer on one such action field team. For him, fixing military helicopters means working with the original design data, documenting and driving ECOs, and capturing revised design data in field. That’s where the laptop—and Creo—come in.

While you’re not likely to see the field repair team in the final scenes of your favourite summer blockbuster, their work is in many ways far more fascinating—especially if you’re interested in manufacturing and engineering. Find out more about Moser, his role, and how Creo running on his laptop is helping him repair and upgrade aircraft in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 Image courtesy of U.S. Air Force, Lance Cheung

Getting Designs off to a Better Start: Conceptual Design

By barb schmitz | Published: June 3, 2011

The very earliest stage of product development, the conceptual phase, plays a very critical role in the eventual success of a new product. Choosing the wrong concept can lead manufacturers down a path to increased design complexity, mandatory redesign, missed deadlines, and growing product cost, and at its worst, can literally bankrupt a business. Assumptions and decisions made at this stage will have a tremendous impact on the product’s design, manufacturing and life so selecting the right concept is probably the most crucial decision manufacturers will make.

During the conceptual stage, engineers and designers rapidly explore and refine ideas. Design participants will engage in free-flowing collaborative brainstorming, exploring a range of design options—in the form of sketches, 2D drawings and layouts, and 3D models—until a final concept design is chosen. Concepts can be start out as designers sketching on paper, though eventually more realistic models need to be created to mimic the function, movement, and look of the real product.

The concept phase, however, isn’t simply a group of people ogling over highly stylized rendered images of concept designs. In many industries, like industrial equipment, aerospace and defense, etc., functional requirements outweigh the importance of aesthetics and styling. In these cases, the design team must take into account the functional requirements of the design (design intent), along with customer needs, manufacturability, environmental issues, and BOM cost issues. In some industries, such as high tech or consumer goods, the functional requirements may be secondary to styling issues, such as curved, sweeping surfaces.

Design intent is the intelligence that defines the fit and function requirements of the product. The ultimate success of the final product hinges upon design intent being captured early; encapsulated in the concept model and maintained throughout the design cycle—all without stifling creativity. Pie-in-the-sky concepts won’t hold up well during the mechanical design process when limiters like physics, mathematics, manufacturability, industry standards, and customer requirements come to bear.

One common mistake is focusing in on one concept too early in the process, often due to outside pressures (marketing demos needed for trade shows, consumer retail cycles, R&D budgets, and competitors).  The result is often bad design decisions, forcing designers, now committed to a concept, to work around complications as they rear their ugly heads throughout the rest of the development process.

In order to prevent such disasters, manufacturers need to really take their time during this crucial phase. Don’t narrow in on one concept too soon and assign multiple designers to flesh out multiple concepts concurrently. Then have several concepts detailed to the point at which the design team can determine with the highest level of confidence, which designs will work. After all, if a design isn’t going to fulfill its design requirements, this is the time to find out.

Tools of the Trade

To facilitate this iterative process, engineers must have the design tools that are very flexible as design concepts at this stage are fluid, changing often. Once created, proposed design concepts—whether in the form of sketches, 2D drawings or 3D models—must be reviewed by the extended design team and perhaps customers, and refined quickly based on their input.  Iterations should be constant at this stage so the design tools must be easy and intuitive enough to be used by non-CAD specialists as well. Often these tools may be different from the MCAD tools used during the detailed design phase.

When conceptual models are handed off to the engineering team and recreated in a MCAD system, not only does this lead to inefficiency in recreating what already exists, but often designs often change dramatically.  This misinterpretation of concept models is often caused by a communication gap between conceptual or industrial designers and the mechanical engineers tasked with creating the 3D CAD model on which the final product will be built. This disconnect between the design/styling team and the rest of the product development team often leads to loss of design intent as designs progress through the design cycle.

One way to mitigate this risk is to choose a suite of design tools that span both concept and detailed design stages. By offering bi-directional interoperability, these tools can reduce the risk of this communication gap and eliminate the need for engineers to reinterpret or re-create designers’ conceptual models, safeguarding design intent and facilitating the re-use of design data so mechanical engineers are not starting from scratch once concept models are approved.

When conceptual design tools and MCAD tools have interoperability with each other, mechanical engineers can simply bring approved sketches, drawings, even 3D concept models into their CAD software and then get to work further refining the model into a true 3D digital model or virtual prototype that can be ultimately designed, tested, and built.

Engineering.com’s Product Design Show: Product Development Gone Social

By Admin | Published: September 7, 2011 

Recently we highlighted Quirky in a blog post titled, “Creo Customers: Quirky.com turns product development into a social affair.” In the following video, the Product Design Show features how PTC’s Creo was used to develop a new type of can opener. See how the Design Engineers of  Quirky used Creo Parametric for advanced surfacing and freestyle capabilities which quickly reformed surface shapes to incorporate feedback from designers and other engineers.

The Tools Used in Conceptual Design

By barb schmitz | Published: September 1, 2011 

 

When designers are provided with the right tools during the conceptual design stage of new product development, they are empowered to think broadly about a problem; visualize, explore, probe, and fully evaluate many ideas quickly; and ultimately, generate several concept designs that will lead to a better product.

These tools should be intuitive and capable of quickly creating realistic models that can be shared and evaluated by others on the design team. These tools must also be flexible, so designs—still fluid and changeable—can be iterated on and recreated quickly based on design input.

Often as a result of this laundry list of requirements—which are quite different from those of an engineer’s CAD software used for more detailed engineering design—manufacturers end up using myriad of concept design tools from multiple vendors that offer little integration with downstream applications.  As a result, these concepts models must often be recreated in engineers’ CAD program, often losing design intent in the process.

Use of Multiple Tools Multiplies Downstream Issues

In a recent study entitled, Trends in Concept Design, conducted by PTC, the majority of participants (51%) said that they capture design concepts and ideas electronically in the form of 3D data. So what software tools are being used during this exploratory phase of design? The lion’s share of participants in the PTC survey (61%) responded that they use 3D CAD modeling and surfacing tools to quickly create a multitude of potential product designs. Based on the survey results, manufacturers use many different tools during this phase of development.

The use of multiple tools from multiple vendors often complicates the process of concept design and creates problems downstream when concept models move to detailed design.  According to the PTC survey, participants who reported that they used tools from multiple software vendors during the concept phase of new product development were three to seven times more likely to have to recreate data due to incompatibility.

According to the survey respondents, companies using design tools from two vendors were three times more likely to have to recreate data later in the design cycle, compared to those using tools from a single vendor. Those using tools from five different vendors were seven times more likely to have to recreate data, than those buying tools from just one vendor.

One way to avoid these issues is to choose a suite of design tools that is capable of handling all phases of design from concept to detailed design through manufacturing. These tools offer bi-directional interoperability, reducing the risk of miscommunication and eliminating the need for engineers to reinterpret or re-create designers’ conceptual models, safeguarding design intent and facilitating the re-use of design data so mechanical engineers are not starting from scratch once concept models are approved.

Standardizing on one suite of design tools can facilitate brainstorming, manage the exploration of ideas, and aid in the development of product concepts within a single environment. By integrating all these efforts into the same software platform, product concept data is managed in a single, cross-disciplinary data repository, which enables team members to access the information in a timely, secure manner. In addition, customers—through the use of intuitive modeling tools—can collaborate and provide feedback to ensure that concepts will ultimately meet their requirements.

When conceptual design tools and MCAD tools have interoperability with each other, the fruits of designers’ labor—sketches, drawings, and 3D concept models—can be seamlessly brought into engineers’ CAD software where they can get to work further refining the model into a true 3D digital model or virtual prototype that can be ultimately designed, tested, and built.

What is concept design? A product development perspective

By Geoff Hedges | Published: August 26, 2011

 

It’s hard to get a straight answer when you Google, what is concept design? Search results come from architects, graphic artists, decorators, web masters, and every other creative type on the internet. That’s why I want to take a few paragraphs to talk about what we mean when we talk about concept design in product development. In 2007, the Danish agency FORA said there is “no collective perception” of concept design. So FORA took on the job of defining the phrase in its 221 page publication (pdf) Concept Design–How to Solve the Complex Challenges of Our Time.  I’ll save you about 220 of those pages: “Concept design is the solution to a problem that has not yet been solved or which so far has been solved unsatisfactorily.”

It’s a thoughtful explanation, but it’s also broad. In fact, you could argue there’s little difference between the expression “concept design” and simply “design.” We take a narrower view. When we talk about concept design, we refer to a phase of the design process, within the product development process.  Recognizing that phases overlap, we specifically mean that after you’ve determined product requirements, but before you start detailed design, you’re in the thick of concept design. Here’s a quick visual:

IDEA–>REQUIREMENTS–>DESIGN concept–>DESIGN detailed–>PROTOTYPE–>MANUFACTURING

Concept design for industrial equipment

Concept design is the initial big picture or macro design. It shows us what problems the product will solve, how it will solve them, and what it will feel like as it is solving them. Arguably the most creative stage of product development, concept design is stickies slapped on whiteboards, ink and wash, napkins and crayons even. It calls on us to consider sweeping ideas and all the various possibilities. The more the better. In concept design lies the very soul of innovation.

Detailed design, for many product developers, signals the introduction of CAD tools. It’s the cold hard truth phase where we build mathematically correct virtual models. In detailed design, we worry about manufacturability, clearances, and how long you can use the product before it starts a fire. One more thing: Notice I didn’t say concept design is limited to sports cars and shiny laptops.  Potato harvesters, water treatment devices, industrial packaging lines, hospital equipment–any product worth developing–goes through some form of concept design. Or should.

Concept design for an electric vehicle

In all of our articles about Creo and concept design, we’re arguing a role exists for CAD before detailed design–in concept design.  Furthermore, we’re working to show it can enhance concept design. But that’s for a future post. [Ed - Like the concept designs we've included in this post? For even more inspiration, browse the PlanetPTC Community for even more designs from our user community]