Marcos Esterman

A Framework for Warranty Prediction During Product Development

This paper describes the challenges faced by companies to manage warranty performance during product development. Understanding and reducing warranty cost often focuses exclusively on the analysis of product failures. However, warranty costs can also be incurred by events such as misaligned customer expectations that do not involve a product failure, per se. Many experts agree that effective management of system reliability and reliability validation during product development is a key to achieve superior time to market and life cycle quality. The paper first surveys the challenges faced by various organizations ranging from consumer electronics to aircraft engines to experimental high-energy physics accelerators. From the survey emerge some key and common issues that these companies face: identification of failure events; reliability modeling and prediction; prototyping and validation testing. The paper then reviews the current state of the art to identify areas for improvements as well as needed integrations in order to develop a comprehensive framework that will be useful to product developers to manage and predict warranty performance during product development. This framework extends and integrates three areas: 1) extend scenario-based FMEA to include the diagnosis and repair of failure events as part of the scenario; 2) use of Bayesian methods to integrate field data, product development data and engineering judgments; 3) generate costs models that allow tradeoff studies between product design, service model design and warranty policies. The paper concludes by presenting a future research agenda.Copyright

A Measure of Impact for Platform Changes

In today’s product development environment, most companies develop product platforms rather than individual products due to the time and cost savings that are reaped from subsequent development efforts. Most of the product platform development literature focuses on the development decisions for a product platform while it is under development, which is logically where the biggest benefits would be gained. However when a new market or a new technology arises, firms often struggle to assess these opportunities within the context of their existing product platforms. There is relatively little work that examines the product platform decisions after the platform has been developed and new, unanticipated opportunities are presented to the development organization. The focus of this work is to leverage the existing literature to development an impact assessment process that explicitly accounts for the constraints of a preexisting product platform when considering new technology and/or market opportunities. In this paper, an overview of the overall assessment process is presented. This is followed by the development of the impact metrics and a case study to illustrate the assessment process. The paper concludes with the next step in this work.Copyright

Reliability Prediction of Remanufactured Product: A Welding Repair Process Case Study

Many experts agree that effective management of system reliability and reliability validation during product development is a key to achieve superior time to market and life cycle quality. However, reliability performance prediction is a common problem faced by all product developers and it is usually a difficult task. A related problem is to determine the reliability performance of a remanufactured product. Clearly, the remanufacturer would like to know the expected reliability of their product before entering it into service, but unlike an original manufacturer, they will typically have much less information available to them. In this paper, a general framework for reliability prediction in a remanufacturing environment is proposed. A case study of a remanufactured engine cylinder head that has had a fatigue crack repaired by a welding process will be presented in order to illustrate the process. The approach combines the use of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Experimental Model Building, Monte Carlo Simulation and Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) to generate a reliability estimate. The FMEA and physical modeling will be used to generate a model that relates the welding process control parameters to the fatigue performance of the test specimens. Monte Carlo Simulation techniques and LEFM will build on the above model to relate the process control parameters to the reliability performance. The paper concludes by discussing the utility of such a model and approach, and presents the future research agenda.Copyright

Design for Assembly Line Performance: The Link Between DFA Metrics and Assembly Line Performance Metrics

While Design for Assembly (DFA) has been a useful design tool, it is not explicitly linked to actual manufacturing line performance. The motivation for this research came from the desire to link DFA directly to line balance and cycle time performance. The natural question that arose was whether these issues could be considered at the design stage by using the metrics that are derived from a DFA analysis. It is known that the time required to assemble a product can be estimated from both a DFA analysis and from a manufacturing analysis. This work links these two analysis methods so that the manufacturing parameters can be estimated and used to guide the design of a product. Starting with a DFA analysis, the minimum number of workstations needed to balance the line that will maintain the production rate (takt time) and precedence constraints is determined. Then the precedence constraints are systematically relaxed in order to generate measures on a component-by-component basis as to the impact it could have on reducing cycle time and improving line balancing performance. These measures, coupled with an understanding of precedence types, are used to identify design improvements to a product. To illustrate how product designer can consider assembly line performance issues during the design stage of the product, the methodology has been applied to an ABS brake assembly.Copyright

Environmental Impact Assessment During Product Development: A Functional Analysis Based Approach to Life Cycle Assessments

As global environmental concerns increase, industries continue to respond prominently to meeting sustainable practice standards through technological innovations and new business models. By implementing sustainable practices companies can create a competitive advantage and ultimately drive profitability in addition to mitigating environmental impacts. However, this potential is limited because current comprehensive environmental metrics, including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), cannot be completed until after the product bill of materials is developed and the manufacturing process has been defined. In addition, the current LCA standards do not provide practitioners with a sufficiently standardized method of conducting an assessment, which makes its application to product development less reliable. This research develops a framework by which environmental impacts of a product system can be assessed and addressed during product development using a more standardized and precise LCA method. The basis of this method integrates systems engineering tools and a functional analysis based approach to LCA. Using this framework, designers can easily develop, classify, and explore different product designs based on predictive environmental impacts.Copyright

Characterization and modeling of surface defects in EP3D printing

Purpose – This paper aims to report an experimental study of how surface defects evolve in EP3D printing as more layers are accumulated and proposes a simulation model for the process. Design/methodology/approach – A series of measurements on the surface roughness were taken layer-by-layer for two 30-layer samples. A model of the process was constructed based on dynamic system modeling, system identification techniques and the analysis of the measurements from the samples. Findings – The transient response of the fuser has a significant impact on the surface of the print. The surface of the EP3D printed part depends heavily on the compliance of the interface. The model developed is able to approximate the behavior of the surface as more layers are deposited. Research limitations/implications – The model requires tuning multiple parameters, especially the compliance threshold for the interface; similar experiments/measurements are needed for any change in the system. Practical implications – The simulation...

Challenges in Incorporating Sustainability Into Product Development: An Exploratory Study

Despite decades of disaggregated initiatives aimed at improving the well-being and quality of life of its employees, their families, communities and stakeholders, many high-technology firms are still struggling to develop an integrated approach to address the triple bottom line aspects of sustainability. In particular how sustainability is being integrated into the product development process, and the challenges that result, is of interest to this work. A literature review into the role of internal factors of how a firm implements a sustainability strategy revealed that it was too normative to guide the implementation of a corporate sustainability strategy at the level of the product development value chain. Therefore, to better understand how senior and mid-level managers actually implement such a strategy, a case study was conducted at two business divisions of two different large, multinational firms that are relatively early in their development of an integrated sustainability strategy. The findings provide insight into the role of internal factors at the level of a business division as it attempts to incorporate sustainability into its product development value chain.Copyright

A Selection Framework for Derivative Products

Firms today increasingly seek to leverage product platforms via derivative product versions of the base platform, but successfully doing so is a significant challenge. Numerous enablers are required, such as robust product development processes, effective and well trained organizations, R&D activities that are aligned to support product strategies, and a clearly defined corporate strategy. In derivative product development firms struggle to identify the optimum derivatives to develop and bring to market. Evaluating which feature to improve upon, which technologies to incorporate, which markets to pursue, and ultimately which derivative product to develop is an uncertain proposition that has significant implications to future profitability. There majority tools and processes that exist to provide guidance in these activities largely focus on platform development strategies and decisions. A limited number are known to apply specifically to derivative products, after the platform has been design and implemented. This work proposes a derivative product concept generation and selection framework that extends the design for variety methodology to analyze derivative product alternatives.Copyright

A pilot study of cognitive-neuroscience mechanism in product concept evaluation

Novel, functional, and aesthetic products are thought to have a high likelihood of success in the marketplace. While making sound design decisions is a critical ability of good designers, evaluating product concepts for their future successes in the marketplace is a challenging task. In design classes, only about half of product concepts selected by student design teams may be retained and prototyped into final products, i.e., about half of student design teams find that their initial product concepts are difficult to make workable and change to different concepts by the time they create prototypes for testing. This paper investigates if electrophysiological concomitants in product concept evaluation may potentially be used to improve students’ and designers’ product concept evaluation processes. The preliminary data in this pilot study indicate that distinct decision-making processes may occur during evaluations of product concepts on novelty, functionality, and aesthetics, evidenced by brain activation differences among students.Copyright

Identifying Enablers and Barriers to Successful Platform-Based Product Development: A Case Study From Business-to-Business Products

Product development teams are facing continued pressure to develop more products in less time and with fewer resources. Platform-based developed is commonly seen as a solution to increase capacity of the product development pipeline. This research identified enablers and barriers to successful platform-based product development. This was achieved through a comprehensive literature review of the current state of the art and an exploratory case study of product development practices within a business-to-business environment from companies with significantly different cultures and experiences with platform-based product development. Key enablers identified in this research include institutionalizing systems engineering, development and communication of product development roadmaps, augmentation of phase gate review process and critical parameter characterization. Operational recommendations from this research are considered to be possible to implement without significant changes to existing processes and organizational structures.Copyright