An Approach to Improve the Product Design Process

The design work made by design engineers needs to be clearly defined and structured. The design process to follow should naturally lead to a systematic design work that reduces wasteful work, and reuses competence and knowledge from previous design work. 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 chapter 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 over more than 15 years. The process is built on 11 checkpoints (A to K), which gives details on the design process and is customized for the specific company. Implementations of TWWD in companies are described in this chapter, where the results have shown a gain in lead-time, development cost, and improved design quality