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:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The reason American cars don’t sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That’s why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.”
—Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1938)