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Product development teams are charged with the responsibility of moving from market requirements for a product to achieving a product success. This includes marketability, manufacturability, and serviceability. Use of such teams is also called concurrent engineering and implies a team representing all affected areas (known as a cross functional team).
Concurrent engineering also implies speedier product development through simultaneous performance of various aspects of product development.

Design for manufacturability and value engineering teams, on the other hand, have a somewhat narrower charge. They are charged with improvement of designs and specifications at the research, development, design, and production stages of product development.

In recent years, many companies have reduced production costs, decreased product development time, and improved product quality by changing their product design processes. The product design processes of these companies have four common elements: -

1. A philosophy of designing for production
2. Concurrent design of the product and the production process
3. Use of multidisciplinary teams
4. Collaboration with suppliers and customers.

Defining and Documenting the Product

Once new goods or services are selected for introduction, they must be defined. First, a good or service is defined in terms of its function, that is, what it is to do. The product is then designed; that is, it is determined how the functions are to be achieved. Management typically has a variety of options as to how a product is to achieve its functional purpose. For instance, when producing an alarm clock, aspects of design such as the colour, size, or location of buttons may make substantial differences in ease of manufacture, quality, and market acceptance.

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* Contributed by: -
Vidhu Goyal,
Graduate from IMT Ghaziabad, Batch of 2006,
Currently working with Max New York Life in Gurgaon.