INGENIEUR
Lean Product Design
FEATURE
By Ir. Dr Oh Seong Por, Samsung SDIEM
The lean production principle as mooted by Womack is aimed at eradicating waste or non valueadded activities and increase speed, thereby creating products that meet customer requirements.
By eradicating waste, it strives to improve the utilization of resources such as human effort,
material, machine, space and time while establishing product value for customers. From the
aspect of economy, the lean principle can be regarded as a business innovation tool to drive down
unnecessary cost, increase competitiveness, maximize profit and at the same time provide superior
products to meet endless growing customer preferences. Application of the lean production
principle, which was originally developed exclusively for manufacturing, has now been expanded to
non-manufacturing activities such as product design and customer service.
Lean product design was established using the lean principle. It is a systematic approach to
identify and eliminate non value-added design features embedded in a product with the objective
of saving resources and driving down cost while creating value for the customer. It consists of
seven steps in which a design engineer gathers valuable information about the product, translates
this into technical attributes with accept able levels of leanness and integrates them into the
manufacturing process. The idea is not to create an entirely new product but more to identifying
superior designs and upgrading product value that is free from waste and excites customers.
This article has been prepared to illustrate the lean product design flow developed by Oh (2011).
It is organised into two sections. Section 1 describes the seven steps of lean product design while
Section 2 discusses a case study of a major electronic manufacturing company in the country that
enjoyed higher product competitiveness by applying the lean product design approach.
SECTION 1 – LEAN PRODUCT DESIGN
The lean product design roadmap consists of
seven major steps which have been systematically
arranged to accomplish objectives discussed
below:
i. To identify customer requirements and
understand the function of components
and products so that design targets can
be accurately set. These align with the 1st
lean principle: value – make products that
precisely match what customers want;
ii. To transform design targets into product
attributes with acceptable leanness; and
iii. To integrate the identified attributes into
product development.
The followings are the detailed descriptions of
each design step:
Step 1 – Product Tear Down
It uses the product tear down technique to
completely dissect a product under study to its
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VOL 55 JUNE 2013
individual components or parts. The product tear
down process serves three primary purposes:
i. to gather baseline information pertaining
to the evolution of a product and its related
components;
ii. to understand how things work; and
iii. to exercise competitive benchmarking
whereby similar products or components
manufactured by competitors are
compared, measured and examined.
The results are used as the baseline to set
design targets.
Before beginning to dissect a product, several
important preparations are needed. First is
to determine the details of the sample to be
tested, such as quantity, type, model etc. Next
is to identify the best method of dissecting the
product. Non destructive testing is compulsory so
that components can be retrieved in their original
form for further comparative analysis. However if