Page 312 - Operations Strategy

PRoduCT And sERviCE dEvEloPmEnT As A PRoCEss 287

Figure 8.7 operations strategy analysis for product and service development

Resource usage

Quality –
error-free designs
that fulfil market
requirements
Speed –
fast development
from concept
Performance objectives Dependability – service development Market competitiveness
to launch
Operations strategy
designs delivered
for the product and
to schedule
Flexibility –
designs that
include latest ideas
Cost –
designs produced
without consuming
excessive cost
Capacity – Supply network – Process Development and
amount of relationships technology – organisation –
development with outside provision of organisation of
resource matched sources of design technology development
to demand development (CAD), expert resources and
over time knowledge systems etc. improvement
strategy
Decision areas

happens in reality, can be very different things. Yet three ideas do seem to have found
wide acceptance:
1 The development process moves through a series of stages, some of which may be
missed out and sometimes the process recycles back through stages. Somewhere
towards the beginning of the process, there are stages concerned with collecting
ideas and generating product and service concepts, and towards the end of the pro-
cess there are stages concerned with specifying the detail of the product or service.
2 As the development process moves through these stages, the number of alternative
design options reduces until one final design remains. The process often includes
decision points that screen out options deemed to be unsatisfactory.
3 As these possible design options are reduced, there is a move from a state of uncer-
tainty regarding the final design to a state of increasing certainty. One consequence
of this is that the ability to change the design gets increasingly limited. Making
changes at the end of the process can be considerably more expensive than making
them at the beginning.
Different authors present different stage models that attempt to describe product and
service development. These vary in the number and type of stages they include but

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