The way we design: a design process and manual for industrial product development

The design work made by designing engineers need to be clearly defined and structured. The design process to follow should naturally lead to a systematic design work that reduce wasteful work, and reuses competence and knowledge from previous design work. The design process should lead to a design work that is made with as little lead-time and cost as possible, yet with a resulting part or product with the right quality. In a time when products become more complex regarding performance, tolerances, material, and with more technological and digital things built into the products, this design process becomes even more important. The Way We Design (TWWD) presented in this paper is one contribution to such a design process for the day-to-day design work. The work behind TWWD is based on both research and industrial practice. The process is built on 11 (A to K) number of checkpoints which gives details on the design work and is customised for the specific company. Included in TWWD, as addition to the design work itself, are details regarding documentation and templates, standards, and directives. TWWD also include details of the design requirements from other departments within the company, such as sales, purchasing, assembly, manufacturing, painting and service. In this way, the designers can incorporate the requirements from their internal colleges and reduce much of the rework due to misinterpretations or design errors that are detected downstream in the manufacturing process or even at the customers. The TWWD process has been implemented at some companies as their manual for how to perform the design work. The results indicates that it is possible to reduce the design lead-time ranging from 5% to 20%, and with better precision in doing the right things and to reduce wasteful work. The design engineers at a medium and at a large company says that it is the resulting design quality that is the most beneficial from TWWD