2 research outputs found
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Investigating and Managing Design Margins throughout the Product Development Process
The automotive industry, like other sectors, faces a number of technological challenges in terms of meeting different legislations and developing products highly customised with a short lead time. They also have to manage the trade-offs between the price for the customer and the overall cost of the product development.
This thesis argues that design margins are a decisive factor with regard to many trade-offs that engineers may wish to make. These margins represent room for manoeuvre in the developing design. On the other hand, design margins allow engineers to accommodate new requirements without leading to costly engineering changes. If a change becomes necessary, the engineers might modify parameters where there are still margins with respect to the new requirements. Therefore engineers can avoid major redesigns to their existing components and systems. Ultimately this has the potential to enable control of the resulting development time and cost.
While margins are an intuitive concept, no clear and consistent definitions exist. The concept is relatively under-investigated area of design research. A comprehensive literature review and an empirical study at Volvo Global Truck Technology, emphasised the main issues and showed that there is a strong industrial need for support with margins, especially to understand how margins shape the design process. The concept of design margins, consisting of buffer and excess is developed. The key to managing product development is the transition from buffer to excess throughout the design process. This gives designers and engineers a rich way to express and communicate information about the forthcoming design to other team members, other teams and suppliers.
The thesis proposes a conceptual framework to investigate and capture design margins. The overall model indicates that a clear elicitation and an explicit documentation of design margins can help decision makers implement more efficiently the necessary changes involved in product development: design margins are seen as a critical aspect of product design and developmen
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Design margins in industrial practice
As products are being developed over time and across organisations, the risk for unintended accumulation and mis-conception of margins allocated may occur. Accumulation of margins can result in over design, but also add risk due to under allocation. This paper describes the different terminology used in one organisation and shows the different roles margins play across the design process and in particular the how margins are a critical but often overlooked aspect of product platform design. The research was conducted in close collaboration with a truck manufacturer between 2013 and 2018. The objective was to gain understanding of the current use of margins, and associated concepts evolve along the product life cycle, across organisation and product platform representations. It was found that margins already play an important role throughout the entire design process; however, it is not recognised as a unified concept which is clearly communicated and tracked throughout the design process. Rather different stakeholders have different notions of margins and do not disclose the rationale behind adding margins or the amount that they have added. Margins also enabled designers to avoid design changes as existing components and systems can accommodate new requirements and thereby saving significant design time