COST, QUALITY, AND TIME-TO-MARKET EVALUATIONS FOR DISCRETE PRODUCTS: STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF EMERGING ENGINEERING DESIGN MODELS

Cost, quality, and time-to-market are the three important criteria for management evaluation of preliminary product designs. In practice, managers often make design decisions by collecting very rough, intuition-based evaluations of these criteria from participating design and manufacturing engineering groups. Such practices are particularly error-prone and inconsistent when evaluating products which incorporate innovative design and processing techniques. In theory, there are some new computer-based methods, initially developed to provide feedback to design engineers, that might also potentially assist broader, strategic evaluation of product designs. The key to such evaluations would be well-structured, operational relationships between engineering design attributes and the aggregated, strategic metrics of cost, quality, and time-to-market. For each of these three criteria, we discuss related methodologies emerging from the engineering design research community and their potential implications for computer-based management tools for decision-making in industrial practice.