Using Acclaro DFSS™ to Solve Design Problems
How should companies capture and analyze requirements?
Most companies have a marketing document that is reputed to be the requirements document. Design teams need to document and manage their own functional requirements document that represents the current design response to ALL of the potential customers of the design process. Axiomatic Design formalizes this process.
What Key Performance Indicators (KPI) do companies use to manage the design synthesis process?
Most companies have no measurement techniques. Usually, companies depend upon their design staff to self-govern their design synthesis processes, often on a person-by-person level.
The common misconception is that this is a creative process which defies measurement. Project managers run around and ask engineers how close they are to meeting some arbitrary milestone, such as a documentation release date. Applying the Axiomatic Design process enables a continuous measurable design process.
Are current CAD tools a solution to these problems?
CAD tools actually contribute to the problem of poor conceptual design. In today’s CAE and CAD-centric environments, designers jump to committing their first pass approaches to CAD. This design and documentation development time is substantial as CAD systems demand a wealth of detail to represent designs.
Building CAD in the initial design process means that key aspects of product or system design quality such as performance, cost, completeness, risk, robustness or safety can’t be structured and independently assessed until CAD documentation release. As such, even when quality or cost issues are now found, it is too late and the cost in time and budget of repeating a CAD design cycle is so high that design teams resort to ‘patching’ rather than properly re-iterating the design.
We implement a gate review process for design. What’s wrong with this?
Gate reviews are an inspection tool to be applied in reviewing work done. Quality is not ‘Inspected’ into a design process.
Is Acclaro DFSS compatible with my current development process?
Acclaro DFSS does not require or dictate a particular development process. Data from Acclaro DFSS is provided in .csv, .xml and other industry standard formats. Axiomatic processes are compatible with TQM, DFSS, QFD and other quality initiatives.
Just as word processor programs can’t write for you and spreadsheet programs can’t create the math for you. Acclaro DFSS is a solution to implement axiomatic processes and record the logic of the design so this logic can be subjected to review and analysis.
In large complex designs, sub-optimal decisions can be visualized and corrected earlier in the process. The skill of the designers solves the problems. Acclaro DFSS facilitates the process.
Will adopting axiomatic design or DFSS tools increase my development time?
Development gurus know that catching problems early in the process is the most cost effective and time reducing development goal. With Acclaro DFSS, axiomatic analysis can be performed in hours on an existing design.
Acclaro DFSS has a minimal learning curve, immediate applicability to design problems, and solutions designed to provide value for a single user, a workgroup, or an enterprise.
Do I need to have 100% of my design to access the benefit of Acclaro DFSS axiomatic analysis tools?
Acclaro DFSS will let you axiomatically analyze and optimize for the design information available. Clearly, the more of the design model developed the greater the potential for identifying sub-optimal decisions.