ABSTRACT
The primary focus of product development should be to develop products, not project management concerns that typically dominate product development efforts. If the actual product development is done right, it will naturally optimize the deadlines, total cost, development budget, and time to stable production. Designing around standard raw materials can save a lot of money and improve availability in the plant, especially for expensive or bulky raw materials. The total cost will probably be less, even if some parts get better materials than needed. Consolidation of expensive parts/modules will raise order volumes, increase purchasing leverage, minimize setup changes, reduce inventory for multiple versions, and arrange steady flows or kanbans of the consolidated part that will be used one way or another. A design team can redesign a backward-compatible “drop-in” replacement that can immediately reduce the cost of an expensive sub-assembly on current and legacy products and then become the foundation of next generation products.
