product design

Since the financial crisis, industrial companies need to deal with an increase of uncertainty and volatility. Therefore, the concept of agile production is discussed strongly as solution concept to react on this situation. Product design and its influences on an agile production is one important lever to increase agility. This article tries to focus on that topic and presents a Design-for-Agility approach.

For many enterprises, an effective innovation management is an essential part of their sustainable corporate strategy. Without a doubt, creating product, process and business model innovations is necessary to survive the dynamic competition of the 21st century. Opinions differ regarding the question which modality is best to attain this goal. A universally valid model to increase innovation dynamics does not exist. However, the conventional approaches of the last few decades have something in common: They seem to reach its limits in the sense of Industry 4.0 and radical market changes. The use of corporate venture capital can enable corporations to not only react to the change, but also to shape it proactively.

This paper describes the successful combination of the two methods Axiomatic Design and TRIZ based on the practical use case in a product development project at a small enterprise. The task included the design and prototypical implementation of a small tractor for viticulture. The major challenge in developing the concept was the requirement that the tractor must move in the narrow streets between closely lying pergolas as well as in steep terrain. The application example underpins the performance of the combined application of Axiomatic Design and TRIZ for the identification and resolution of technical and physical contradictions and shows how even small businesses can bring innovative and sophisticated product ideas targeted for implementation in close cooperation with research institutions.

For increasing their product development and production efficiency, large-scale enterprises, mainly the automotive industry and their suppliers, more and more often make use of methodological instruments. A few of these methods have already made their way to the small and medium sized enterprises (SME), mainly of the mechanical engineering branch. The most important among these instruments are: Concurrent Engineering, Design for X, Failure mode and effect analysis, Quality Function Deployment and Value Analysis. And even more recent methods like TRIZ Method or Scenario Management are already observed with great interest by some of the SME because of their need for shorter development times, cost minimisation, increase of product quality, and, in consequence, their efforts for restructuring product development processes.

Small and medium enterprises (SME) in the automotive supplier industry are facing rising demands concerning cost and quality of the parts or assemblies they are manufacturing for their cus-tomers. Additionally, the “time-to-market” has to be reduced. Applying traditional methods for rationalization is not sufficient to cope with these requirements. Furthermore, flexible, open, and efficient business processes and technologies are required in the early stages of the product life cycle. In this contribution, the potential of solution approaches based on collaborative, virtual product and process design and optimization is introduced. An example of a metal forming process in automotive supplier industry is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.