The transfer of methods into industry

Global competition and the transition from the sellers' market to the buyers' market force industrial companies to develop products in less time, at lower cost and with higher quality.The competitive capacity of a company is ultimately determined by its product development capabilities. A shortened development time is one of the most important success factors, but commonly results in increased process complexity. In addition, rising quality requirements, distributed development processes, and more complex products have also increased process complexity.Therefore, the need for methods, strategies and tools that support designers in their endeavour is ever increasing. Elaborate methods, such as failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), quality function deployment (QFD), design of experiments, design for manufacture and assembly, as well as integrated product and process development have received much attention in recent years as means to improve industrial product development processes. However, the implementation of these methodologies has not always been successful (Mai, 1999). Circumstances in industrial companies, such as time pressure, stringent quality requirements or characteristics of existing methods, hinder the implementation of new methods, strategies and tools. As a result, the rich body of design methodology, which is the result of more than 30 years of research, is only reluctantly transferred into industrial practice and the available methods are commonly not utilised to their full extent. In recent years, a number of strategies and guidance methods for the implementation of design methods into industrial practice have been developed, which can be summarised under the heading of 'method implementation'. Method implementation should be understood as a collection of practical measures that transfer methods into practice and ensure that they are actually used. This chapter contains: • an overview of research into method implementation; • the presentation of a model of method implementation; • a list of available strategies and guidance grouped according to the model; • a description of a current method implementation process. The contents of this chapter are intended to be used as a 'map' that provides designers and design managers with an overview of the issues that have to be considered during method implementation, and references to the literature where they can find strategies and guidance for success.