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:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ’s sake not black—
nor white either—and not polished!
Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)