ABSTRACT
The function of product planning department is to plan the development of the “right” product. Benchmarking is used to compare currently available competitors’ products with the manufacturer’s product concepts to understand the “gaps” between the product concepts and the benchmarked products. Benchmarking and breakthrough methods are generally used during the very early stages of a product development program. The Pugh diagram is a tabular formatted tool consisting of a matrix of product attributes and alternate product concepts along with benchmark product called the datum. Timing charts and gateways are probably the most important product planning tools after the decision on the type of vehicle to be developed is made. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a technique used to understand customer needs and transform the customer needs into engineering characteristics of a product in terms of functional or design requirements. The QFD technique can be cascaded in multiple steps to link customer needs for the product to its component-level production specifications.
