Chapter 4

Product & Service Design

McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Strategic Product and Service Design

• The essence of an organization is the goods and

services it offers
– Every aspect of the organization is structured around
them
• Product and service design – or redesign – should be
closely tied to an organization’s strategy

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

1. Translates customer wants and needs into product and service

requirements (marketing, operations)

The abacus
was initially
used for
arithmetic
tasks. The
Roman
Abacus was
developed
from devices
used in
Babylonia as
early as 2400
BC.

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

2. Refines existing products and services (marketing)

A dual soroban-
calculator,
Sharp Elsi Mate
EL-8048
Sorokaru,
produced from
1979 (Japan)

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?
3. Develops new products and services (marketing, operations)

Electromechanical computer 1981: The first IBM personal computer is introduced

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

4. Formulates quality goals (marketing, operations)

“…fully functional computers that are designed for portability and

convenience.

Less Weight
More Desk Space
Fewer Peripherals
Travel and Portability”

https://itstillworks.com/purpose-laptop-2459.html

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

5. Formulates cost targets (accounting, finance, operations)

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

6. Constructs and tests prototypes (operations, marketing,

engineering)

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

7. Documents specifications

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What Does Product & Service Design Do?

8. Translates product and service specifications into process

specifications (engineering, operations)

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Ethical Considerations
• Produce designs that are consistent with the goals
of the organization. For instance, if the company
has a goal of high quality, don’t cut corners to save
cost.
• Give customers the value they expect.
• Make health and safety a primary concern. At risk
are employees who will produce goods or deliver
services, workers who will transport the products,
customers who will use the products or receive the
services, and the general public, which might be
endangered by the products or services.

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Product or service life stages

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Life Stage Strategies
• Introduction
– Weigh trade-offs between eliminating ‘bugs’ and getting the product or
service to the market at an advantageous time
– Accurate demand forecasts are important to ensuring adequate capacity
availability
• Growth
– Demand forecasts are important to ensuring a continued adequate capacity
availability
– Design improvements
– Emphasis on improved product or service reliability and lower cost
• Maturity
– Relatively few design changes
– Emphasis is on high productivity and low cost
• Decline
– Continue or discontinue product or service
– Identify alternative uses for product or service
– Continued emphasis on high productivity and low cost

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Reliability

• Reliability
– The ability of a product, part, or system to perform its
intended function under a prescribed set of conditions
– Failure
• Situation in which a product, part, or system does not
perform as intended
– Normal operating conditions
• The set of conditions under which an item’s reliability is
specified

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Designing for Production
• Concurrent engineering
- means bringing design and manufacturing engineering people together early
in the design phase to simultaneously develop the product and the processes
for creating the product

• Computer-assisted design
- uses computer graphics for product design so the designer can modify an
existing design or create a new one on a monitor by means of a light pen, a
keyboard, a joystick, or a similar device

• Designing for assembly and disassembly

- designers must take into account production capabilities (equipment, skills,
etc.), forecasts, manufacturability

• Component commonality
- when a part can be used in multiple products.

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 A method used in service design to
Service Blueprint describe and analyze a proposed service.

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The Well-Designed Service System
• Characteristics
– Being consistent with the organization mission
– Being user-friendly
– Being robust if variability is a factor
– Being easy to sustain
– Being cost-effective
– Having value that is obvious to the customer
– Having effective linkages between back- and front-of-the-house
operations
– Having a single, unifying theme
– Having design features and checks that will ensure service that
is reliable and of high quality

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