Page 90 - Design for Six Sigma a Roadmap for Product Development

Product Development Process and Design for Six Sigma 65

System level

Sub-system level

Component level

Detailed level

Hierarchical design deployment
Figure 3.5 Hierarchical design deployment.

From the above discussion we can clearly see that
1. Product design is a multiple-domain mapping process.
2. Within each domain of the product design, there is a complicated
hierarchical design deployment process.

Due to the above two features of the product design work, it is not dif-
ficult to understand why the product development process is usually a
complicated multistage process described in Chap. 1 and illustrated in
Fig. 1.1.

3.2.3 Nature of the product
development process
In D. Reinertsen’s excellent book Managing Design Factories
(Reinertsen 1997), he compared the product development with the
“recipe development” in the restaurant business and stated that the
natures of these two tasks are essentially the same. Both the product
development and recipe development are generating new information
and knowledge that can capture revenues in the marketplace.
If we closely look at what the product development team is doing
every day, we find out that they are creating documents, compiling test
reports, doing design analysis, drafting graphs, calculating survey
data statistics, creating specifications, building prototypes, designing
and making tools for producing the product, and developing assembly
operations. In general, they are generating all kinds of information
and knowledge. Whenever the product development team generates
enough useful information to produce the product effectively, reliably,
economically, and with good quality, and the products shipped to