Development and Design
With increasing globalization and easier access to alternative products in today’s markets, the importance of product design in demand generation is more significant than ever. In addition, as supply, and therefore competition, among companies for the limited market demand increases and pricing and other marketing elements become less distinguishing factors, product design also plays a different role by providing attractive features to generate demand. In this context, demand generation is used to define how attractive a product design is in terms of creating demand.
In other words, it is the ability of a product design to generate demand by satisfying customer expectations. However, product design impacts not only demand generation, but also manufacturing processes, cost, quality, and lead time. The product design affects the associated supply chain and its requirements directly including, but not limited to: manufacturing, transportation, quality, quantity, production schedule, material selection, production technologies, production policies, regulations, and laws. From a broad perspective, the success of the supply chain depends on the product design and the capabilities of the supply chain, but the reverse is also true—the success of the product depends on the supply chain that produces it.
Since the product design dictates multiple requirements on the supply chain, as mentioned previously, it is clear that once a product design is completed, it drives the structure of the supply chain, limiting the flexibility of the engineers to generate and evaluate different (potentially more cost effective) supply chain alternatives.
Read more about this topic: Supply Chain
Famous quotes containing the words development and/or design:
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)