- More than 80% of production costs are determined by product design. The designers therefore need to have excellent understanding of manufacturing technologies and working closely together with the manufacturing engineers.
- The functions of the design need to be clearly understood (see Quality Function Deployment) and features that are ‘important to function’ need to be identified, analyzed and tracked consequently
- The design and manufacturing concept, will make sure that ‘important to function’ features can be achieved in serial production in a robust and reliable way.
- Design reviews help the engineer team to have a look from ‘fresh eyes’ on their ideas and concepts and will avoid the intrinsic problem to be blind for identifying self generated issues. In the agile development daily (scrum)meetings are a great way to communicate, calibrate and prioritize activities with the team.
- Quality management methods support the developers in their daily work, in the design release process and root causing problems. Most importantly is it to have preventive actions, that avoid expensive and late design changes or redundant mistakes.
