Good design satisfies customers, communicates the purpose of the product or service to its market, and brings financial rewards to the business. The objective of good design, whether of products or services is to satisfy customers by meeting their actual or anticipated needs and expectations. This, in turn, enhances the competitiveness of the organization. Product and service design, therefore, can be seen as starting and ending with the customer. So the design activity has one overriding objective: to provide products, services and processes which will satisfy the operation’s customers. Product designers try to achieve aesthetically pleasing designs which meet or exceed customers’ expectations. They also try to design a product which performs well and is reliable during its lifetime. Further, they should design the product so that it can be manufactured easily and quickly. Similarly, service designers try to put together a service which meets, or even exceeds, customer expectations. Yet at the same time the service must be within the capabilities of the operation and be delivered at reasonable cost.
In fact, the business case for putting effort into good product and service design is over- whelming according to the UK Design Council.2 Using design throughout the business ultimately boosts the bottom line by helping create better products and services that compete on value rather than price. Designhelps businesses connect strongly with their customers by anticipating their real needs. That in turn gives them the ability to set themselves apart in increasingly tough markets. Furthermore, using design both to generate new ideas and turn them into reality allows businesses to set the pace in their markets and even create new ones rather than simply responding to the competition.
Good design enhances profitability
What is designed in a product or service?
All products and services can be considered as having three aspects:
● a concept, which is the understanding of the nature, use and value of the service or product;
● a packageof ‘component’ products and services that provide those benefits defined in the concept;
● the processdefines the way in which the component products and services will be created and delivered.
The concept
Designers often talk about a ‘new concept’. This might be a concept car specially created for an international show or a restaurant concept providing a different style of dining. The concept is a clear articulation of the outline specification including the nature, use and value of the product or service against which the stages of the design (see later) and the resultant product and/or service can be assessed. For example, a new car, just like existing cars, will have an underlying concept, such as an economical two-seat convertible sports car, with good road-holding capabilities and firm, sensitive handling, capable of 0 –100 kph in 7 seconds and holding a bag of golf clubs in the boot. Likewise a concept for a restaurant might be a bold and brash dining experience aimed at the early 20s market, with contemporary décor and music, providing a range of freshly made pizza and pasta dishes.
Although the detailed design and delivery of the concept requires designers and operations managers to carefully design and select the components of the package and the processes by which they will be created or delivered, it is important to realize that customers are buying more than just the package and process; they are buying into the particular concept. Patients consuming a pharmaceutical company’s products are not particularly concerned about the ingredients contained in the drugs they are using nor about the way in which they were made, they are concerned about the notion behind them, how they will use them and the benefits they will provide for them. Thus the articulation, development and testing of the concept is a crucial stage in the design of products and services.
The package of products and services
Normally the word ‘product’ implies a tangible physical object, such as a car, washing machine or watch, and the word ‘service’ implies a more intangible experience, such as an evening at a restaurant or a nightclub. In fact, as we discussed in Chapter 1, most, if not all, operations produce a combination of products andservices. The purchase of a car includes the car itself and the services such as ‘warranties’, ‘after-sales services’ and ‘the services of the person selling the car’. The restaurant meal includes products such as ‘food’ and ‘drink’ as well as services such as ‘the delivery of the food to the table and the attentions of the waiting
Remember that not all new products and services are created in response to a clear and articulated customer need. While this is usually the case, especially for products and services that are similar to (but presumably better than) their predecessors, more radical innovations are often brought about by the innovation itself creating demand. Customers don’t usually know that they need something radical. For example, in the late 1970s people were not asking for microprocessors, they did not even know what they were. They were improvised by an engineer in the USA for a Japanese customer who made calculators. Only later did they become the enabling technology for the PC and after that the innumerable devices that now dominate our lives.
Critical commentary
Concept Package
Process
staff ’. It is this collection of products and services that is usually referred to as the ‘package’
that customers buy. Some of the products or services in the package are core, that is they are fundamental to the purchase and could not be removed without destroying the nature of the package. Other parts will serve to enhance the core. These are supporting goods and services.
In the case of the car, the leather trim and guarantees are supporting goods and services.
The core good is the car itself. At the restaurant, the meal itself is the core. Its provision and preparation are important but not absolutely necessary (in some restaurants you might serve and even cook the meal yourself ). By changing the core, or adding or subtracting supporting goods and services, organizations can provide different packages and in so doing create quite different concepts. For instance, engineers may wish to add traction control and four-wheel drive to make the two-seater sports car more stable, but this might conflict with the concept of an ‘economical’ car with ‘sensitive handling’.
The process
The package of components which make up a product, service or process are the ‘ingredi- ents’ of the design; however, designers need to design the way in which they will be created and delivered to the customer – this is process design. For the new car the assembly line has to be designed and built which will assemble the various components as the car moves down the line. New components such as the cloth roof need to be cut, stitched and trimmed. The gear box needs to be assembled. And, all the products need to be sourced, purchased and delivered as required. All these and many other manufacturing processes, together with the service processes of the delivery of cars to the showrooms and the sales processes have to be designed to support the concept. Likewise in the restaurant, the manufacturing processes of food purchase, preparation and cooking need to be designed, just like the way in which the customers will be processed from reception to the bar or waiting area and to the table and the way in which the series of activities at the table will be performed in such a way as to deliver the agreed concept.
Core products and services
Supporting products and services
In 1907 a janitor called Murray Spangler put together a pillowcase, a fan, an old biscuit tin and a broom handle.
It was the world’s first vacuum cleaner. One year later he sold his patented idea to William Hoover whose company went on to dominate the vacuum cleaner market for decades, especially in its United States homeland. Yet between 2002 and 2005 Hoover’s market share dropped from 36 per cent to 13.5 per cent. Why?
Because a futuristic-looking and comparatively expensive rival product, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, had jumped from nothing to over 20 per cent of the market. In fact, the Dyson product dates back to 1978 when James Dyson noticed how the air filter in the spray-finishing room of a company where he had been working was constantly clogging with powder particles ( just like a vacuum cleaner bag clogs with dust). So he designed and built an industrial cyclone tower, which removed the powder particles by exerting centrifugal forces. The question intriguing him was, ‘Could the same principle work in a domestic vacuum cleaner?’Five years and
Short case
Spangler, Hoover and Dyson
3five thousandprototypes later he had a working design, since praised for its ‘uniqueness and functionality’.
However, existing vacuum cleaner manufacturers were not as impressed – two rejected the design outright.
So Dyson started making his new design himself. Within a few years Dyson cleaners were, in the UK, outselling James Dyson
Source:Alamy Images
the rivals that had once rejected them. The aesthetics and functionality of the design help to keep sales growing in spite of a higher retail price. To Dyson, good ‘is about looking at everyday things with new eyes and working out how they can be made better. It’s about challenging existing technology’.
Dyson engineers have taken this technology one stage further and developed core separator technology to capture even more microscopic dirt. Dirt now goes through three stages of separation. Firstly, dirt is drawn
into a powerful outer cyclone. Centrifugal forces fling larger debris, such as pet hair and dust particles, into the clear bin at 500 Gs (the maximum G-force the human body can take is 8 Gs). Second, a further cyclonic stage, the core separator, removes dust particles as small as 0.5 microns from the airflow – particles so small you could fit 200 of them on this full stop. Finally, a cluster of smaller, even faster cyclones generate centrifugal forces of up to 150,000 G – extracting particles as small as mould and bacteria.
Figure 5.2 The design activity is itself a process The design activity is one
of the most important operations processes
Concept generation Screening Preliminary design Evaluation and improvement Prototyping and final design
The design activity is itself a process
Producing designs for products, services is itself a process which conforms to the input–
transformation–output model described in Chapter 1. It therefore has to be designed and managed like any other process. Figure 5.2 illustrates the design activity as an input–
transformation–output diagram. The transformed resource inputs will consist mainly of information in the form of market forecasts, market preferences, technical data, and so on.
Transforming resource inputs includes operations managers and specialist technical staff, design equipment and software such as computer-aided design (CAD) systems (seelater) and simulation packages. One can describe the objectives of the design activity in the same way as we do any transformation process. All operations satisfy customers by producing their services and goods according to customers’ desires for quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
In the same way, the design activity attempts to produce designs to the same objectives.