Chap 6 Product Specification

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS
Chapter 6
PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS
 The development team had spent a great deal of time identifying customer
needs.As a result of this process they had assembled a list of customer needs.
They now faced several challenges:
1. • How could the relatively subjective customer needs be translated into precise
targets for the remaining development effort?
2. • How could the team and its senior management agree on what would constitute
success or failure of the resulting product design?
3. • How could the team develop confidence that its intended product would garner
a substantial share of the suspension fork market?
4. • How could the team resolve the inevitable trade-offs among product
characteristics like cost and weight?
WHAT ARE SPECIFICATIONS?
 Product specifications to mean the precise description of what the product has to
do. Some firms use the terms “product requirements” or “engineering
characteristics” in this way. Other firms use “specifications” or “technical
specifications” to refer to key design variables of the product such as the oil
viscosity or spring constant of the suspension system.
 A specification (singular) consists of a metric and a value. For example, “average
time to assemble” is a metric, while “less than 75 seconds” is the value of this
metric. Note that the value may take on several forms, including a particular
number, a range, or an inequality. Values are always labeled with the appropriate
units (e.g., seconds, kilograms, joules). Together, the metric and value form a
specification. The product specifications (plural) are simply the set of the individual
specifications.
WHEN ARE SPECIFICATIONS ESTABLISHED?
 In an ideal world, the team would establish the product specifications once early in
the development process and then proceed to design and engineer the product to
exactly meet those specifications.
 for technology-intensive products specifications are established at least twice.
Immediately after identifying the customer needs, the team sets target
specifications. These specifications represent the hopes and aspirations of the team,
but they are established before the team knows what constraints the product
technology will place on what can be achieved. The team’s efforts may fail to meet
some of these specifications and may exceed others, depending on the product
concept the team eventually selects. For this reason, the target specifications must
be refined after a product concept has been selected.
ESTABLISHING TARGET SPECIFICATIONS
 the target specifications are established after the customer needs have been
identified but before product concepts have been generated and the most promising
one(s) selected. An arbitrary setting of the specifications may not be technically
feasible. For example, in designing a suspension fork, the team cannot assume in
advance that it will be able to achieve simultaneously a mass of 1 kilogram, a
manufacturing cost of $30, and the best descent time on the test track, as these are
three quite aggressive specifications.
 Actually meeting the specifications established at this point is contingent upon the
details of the product concept the team eventually selects. For this reason, such
preliminary specifications are labeled “target specifications.” They are the goals of
the development team, describing a product that the team believes would succeed
in the marketplace. Later these specifications will be refined based on the
limitations of the product concept actually selected.
 The process of establishing the target specifications contains four steps:

1. Prepare the list of metrics.
2. Collect competitive benchmarking information.
3. Set ideal and marginally acceptable target values.
4. Reflect on the results and the process.
Step 1: Prepare the List of Metrics:
 The most useful metrics are those that reflect as directly as possible the degree to which the
product satisfies the customer needs. The relationship between needs and metrics is central to
the entire concept of specifications. The working assumption is that a translation from
customer needs to a set of precise, measurable specifications is possible and that meeting
specifications will therefore lead to satisfaction of the associated customer needs.
 A list of metrics is shown in Exhibit 6-4. A good way to generate the list of metrics is to
contemplate each need in turn and to consider what precise, measurable characteristic of the
product will reflect the degree to which the product satisfies that need.
Metric No. Need Nos Metric Imp .Units
9 7 Total mass 4 Kg
18 13 Unit manufacturing cost 5 $US
21 16,17 Time to disassemble/assemble for maintenance 3 s
26 20 Bending strength (frontal loading) 5 KN
 EXHIBIT 6-4 List of metrics for the suspension.
 Page 97, 98 additional explanation on matrix guidelines

 Step 2: Collect Competitive Benchmarking Information
 Unless the team expects to enjoy a total monopoly, the relationship of the new product
to competitive products is paramount in determining commercial success. While the
team will have entered the product development process with some idea of how it
wishes to compete in the marketplace, the target specifications are the language the team
uses to discuss and agree on the detailed positioning of its product relative to existing
products, both its own and competitors’. Information on competing products must be
gathered to support these positioning decisions.
 Gathering these data can be very time consuming, involving (at the least) purchasing,
testing, disassembling, and estimating the production costs of the most important
competitive products.
 Step 3: Set Ideal and Marginally Acceptable Target Values

 In this step, the team synthesizes the available information in order to actually set the
target values for the metrics. Two types of target value are useful: an ideal value and a
marginally acceptable value. The ideal value is the best result the team could hope for.
The marginally acceptable value is the value of the metric that would just barely make
the product commercially viable. Both of these targets are useful in guiding the
subsequent stages of concept generation and concept selection, and for refining the
specifications after the product concept has been selected.
 Additional information on pages, 99,100.

 Step 4: Reflect on the Results and the Process

 The team may require some iteration to agree on the targets. Reflection after each teration helps to
ensure that the results are consistent with the goals of the project.
 Questions to consider include:
1. Are members of the team “gaming”? For example, is the key marketing representative insisting that
an aggressive value is required for a particular metric in the hopes that by setting a high goal, the
team will actually achieve more than if his or her true, and more lenient, beliefs were expressed?
2. Should the team consider offering multiple products or at least multiple options for the product in
order to best match the particular needs of more than one market segment, or will one “average”
product suffice?
3. Are any specifications missing? Do the specifications reflect the characteristics that will dictate
commercial success? Once the targets have been set, the team can proceed to generate solution
concepts.
 The target specifications then can be used to help the team select a concept and will help the team
know when a concept is commercially viable.
SETTING THE FINAL SPECIFICATIONS
 As the team finalizes the choice of a concept and prepares for subsequent design and development,
the specifications are revisited. Specifications that originally were only targets expressed as broad
ranges of values are now refined and made more precise.
 Finalizing the specifications is difficult because of trade-offs—inverse relationships between two
specifications that are inherent in the selected product concept. Trade-offs frequently occur between
different technical performance metrics and almost always occur between technical performance
metrics and cost. The difficult part of refining the specifications is choosing how such trade-offs
will be resolved.
 Here, we propose a five-step process:
1. Develop technical models of the product. 2. Develop a cost model of the product.
3. Refine the specifications, making trade-offs where necessary.
4. Flow down the specifications as appropriate. 5. Reflect on the results and the process.

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What challenges did the development team face?

What are product specifications and what is their purpose?

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

 The process of establishing the target specifications contains four steps:

 Page 97, 98 additional explanation on matrix guidelines

 Step 3: Set Ideal and Marginally Acceptable Target Values

 Additional information on pages, 99,100.

 Step 4: Reflect on the Results and the Process

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