Concept Engineering

Particularly in the 21st Century, the growth industry of high technology products, change, innovation, and new product development have become a way of life. Unfortunately, too frequently product development is a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around. To help ensure that a new product will be well received in the marketplace, a detailed requirements analysis can be performed. Concept engineering is the process of translating customer requirements into operational definitions with measurable performance parameters. Specifically, the concept engineering process comprises five stages: Understanding the customer's environment, converting this understanding into requirements, operationalizing what has been learned, concept generation, and concept selection.

There is a single-frame cartoon of a scientist scribbling madly on a blackboard while explaining his esoteric theory to a colleague. To the left on the board are arcane-looking equations and to the right was the grand solution. In the middle of all this mathematical activity, however, was simply written: "And then a miracle occurs." We laugh, of course, because sometimes the premise and the conclusions of scientific ventures seem only loosely connected, with the details a mystery. Too often, this is also the case in the practical application of science and engineering, in particular in new product development. The analysts and engineers collect data concerning customer needs and requirements and then mysteriously develop a concept that is intended to meet those needs.

Particularly in the twenty-first century, the growth industry of high technology products, change, innovation, and new product development have become a way of life. To remain competitive, new product development has become essential to many industries today and more new products are appearing on the market today than ever before. Today's cutting edge technology frequently becomes tomorrow's distant memory as new and better technologies and products continue to flood the market. This situation means that for an organization to stay ahead of its competition, it must be on the leading edge of its field. If it is not, the organization can experience numerous problems that can affect its bottom line including slow or no growth, decreasing customer base, fewer orders from existing customers, or increasing pressure from the marketplace to lower one's prices. Therefore, regular and efficient development and introduction of new products has become a necessity in many industries.

New Product Development Process

All too frequently, product development is a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around. Yet, no matter how innovative or creative the solution, if it does not meet the real needs of the customer, then it is doomed to failure. Unfortunately, however, many organizations prefer to skimp on the front-end analysis phase of the new product development process falsely assuming that they are saving time and money. As a result, however, they often have insufficient information to make realistic design decisions that will result in a product that will meet the customers' requirements or meet the needs of the marketplace. It is the early stages in the product development process -- understanding of customer requirements and product concept development -- that are essential for laying the groundwork for developing an effective and successful product that will meet the needs of the customer (Figure 1). Yet the literature suggests that these steps are either poorly understood or poorly executed in all too many cases. However, many studies conclude that a thorough front-end analysis and focus on these steps in the development process can go a long way to making the project a success.

Requirements Analysis

Before a new product can be developed either as an in-house development effort in reaction to a perceived marketplace need or as a direct result of a customer need, a detailed requirements analysis needs to be performed. To do this, the current business situation is analyzed to determine what the current state of the situation is, where the organization would like to move the situation, and what is needed to get from the current state to the desired state. This phase of the product's life cycle comprises a research study in which data on the requirements of the customer or marketplace are collected and analyzed to determine how best to proceed within the constraints set out by the organization (e.g., constraints of time, budget, personnel, or other resources).

Data collected in this process might include:

• What is currently being done.
• How frequently it is done.
• How frequently it occurs.
• The volume of tasks being done in the current situation.

In addition, the requirements analysis should include an analysis of how well the task is currently being performed by other products or services and if and where a problem exists. If a problem exists, the requirements analysis must also determine how serious the problem is to the effectiveness of the business process or the organization in general, what the cause of the problem is, and who is affected.

Planning & Design

The next step in the process is to plan and design the new system. This involves translating the customer or marketplace requirements that were determined in the previous phase of the process into a product or service concept and concomitant design specifications. These specifications are technical requirements for the development of an application that will meet the requirements for which it is being designed. To start, a preliminary or conceptual design must be developed. The concept specifies the distinguishing features of the application and conceptualizes how they will perform in order to meet the requirements previously determined.

Concept Engineering

Concept engineering is the process of translating customer requirements into operational definitions with measurable performance parameters. In the systems development life cycle, concept engineering occurs after requirements determination and before development and construction. It is a structured process that uses decision aids and alternates between data collection and data analysis and interpretation. In particular, concept engineering helps product engineers and design teams understand what is important to the customer, how these concepts will be measured, and how they will be met in the design.

Decision Analysis

Concept engineering arose out of the philosophy of total quality management. In this approach, the goal is to continually increase the quality of goods and services as well as customer satisfaction through raising awareness of quality concerns across the organization. A number of decision aids for total quality management as applied to a quality deployment case study led to the development of a process to operationally define customer requirements. The initial work in this effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) evolved into a two-year collaborative effort of a team comprising member companies of the Center for Quality Management and MIT. The work done on this project led to the development of concept engineering into a complete system for decision analysis.

Design Objective Credibility

As part of the development effort of the concept engineering process between MIT and the Center for Quality Management, Burchill and Fine conducted research to evaluate the effectiveness of concept engineering for developing product concepts. Although the researchers experienced difficulty in finding randomly assigned teams, in the end they were able to observe five teams: three that used concept engineering methodology and two that did not. The researchers found that design objective credibility (an abstraction of buy-in and design objective understanding) was a core variable in all the development projects in the study.

Design objective credibility helped give the development teams direction in the decision making processes and gave them more flexibility and confidence in making development decisions. This situation, in turn, lead to substantive developmental progress in the concept engineering groups. Concomitantly, it was also observed that a lack of design objective credibility resulted in misdirected effort. Further, it was found that clarity of the requirement, prioritization, and credibility were necessary and sufficient to foster design objective credibility.

Time-focused vs. Market-focused

The study also found that another factor influencing the effectiveness of the concept engineering approach was whether the team primarily had a time- or market-focused strategy. In a time-focused strategy, the team attempted to solve the design objectives under a deadline or in an accelerated time period. Time-focused teams experienced a greater pressure to make progress than did market-focused teams. As a result, they tended to be more willing to make decisions without sufficient data (whether this was a known or an unknown deficiency.

Market-focused teams, on the other hand, tended to develop credible design objectives that reflected a deep understanding of the customer's requirements. These teams were more oriented toward decision processes that maximized the benefit to the customer than were the time-focused teams. It was further found that a relative emphasis on time increased the pressure for progress and reduced the opportunity for systematic concept analysis. This, in turn, decreased the concept development time. Concomitantly, it also decreased the generation of supporting evidence that was used to support design decisions. This resulted in more problems in the development efforts later in projects. In market-focused teams, on the other hand, there tended to be less pressure for progress. This situation fostered the performance of systematic concept analysis with increased supporting evidence as well as increased development time. However, the authors conclude that in the long run, substantive accomplishments will increase and total development time and pressure for progress will decrease. Much like the fable of the tortoise and the hare, these results suggest that increased emphasis on a thorough, thoughtful front end analysis and concomitant concept development and engineering will, in the long run, be a more successful strategy for getting a product to market more quickly.

Applications

Concept Engineering Process

Although every new development project is different, there are certain principles and steps that should be taken in order to do the kind of thoughtful front end analysis that will enable the development team to create a product or service concept that is responsive to the needs of the customer and that will help to ensure a more timely delivery with a less problematic process downstream. To this end, the concept engineering process comprises five stages:

• Understanding the customer's environment.
• Converting this understanding into requirements.
• Operationalizing what has been learned.
• Concept generation.
• Concept selection.

The five stages and their supporting steps are shown in Figure 2.

The Customer's Environment

The first stage in concept engineering is to understand the customer's environment. At this point in the process, the analyst or development team works with the customer to better understand the actual environment in which the product or service under development will be used. Working with the customer in this way helps the development team better understand the real requirements of the customer as well as the limitations of the situation in which the product or service will be used. In addition, involving the customer at this early stage in the development process not only establishes a better working relationship with the customer, but typically also results in better data concerning customer wants and needs because the customer feels involved in the process. One of the end products of this stage of the concept engineering process is a conceptualized image of the customer's environment that can be used as a common mental map for future concept discussions and decisions.

Requirements

The second stage in concept engineering is the translation of the understanding of the customer's needs and environment into requirements that can be used in the design and development process. The data collected in the first stage of the process are analyzed and synthesized in order to develop a well articulated set of critical requirements. These will be used as the basis of further design and development work. One of the important aspects of this stage of the process is to determine the critical requirements of the system. This can sometimes be a complicated procedure requiring not only technical expertise on the part of the design team, but tact as well.

Although it is essential that customers be involved in this process, it is also important to understand that the customer cannot necessarily articulate their needs or separate needs from desires. For example, a number of years ago a hot topic of discussion in military training circles regarded the degree of realism needed in the design of training equipment. When designing a piece of training equipment for the maintenance or operation of complex equipment, it is sometimes difficult to determine the degree of realism that needs to be included in the equipment so that it will adequately and accurately train students in the tasks that they need to know to a level that allows the knowledge and skills to be transferred to the real world situation. Often, the customer's subject matter experts will want the training equipment to be a nearly exact physical representation of the actual equipment. The vendor's design team, on the other hand, often tends to downplay the importance of realism in deference for keeping costs of the equipment down.

The truth however, often lies somewhere in the middle. For example, in some situations, it is important to be able to hear the sound of a jet engine in order to know when an adjustment is necessary; in other situations, however, auditory cues are irrelevant. A good compromise in such situations would be to utilize an audio recording for the one task rather than increasing the cost of the overall equipment by including an audio simulator for tasks where there are no auditory cues. For this reason, it is important that those performing the concept engineering analysis tasks come from a variety of relevant disciplines that can look at the customer's environment and requirements from many aspects.

Operationalizing

The third stage in the concept engineering process is operationalizing what has been learned during the first two stages. At this point in the process, the customer's requirements need to be operationally defined in terms that will make it possible to quantifiably determine whether or not these requirements have been adequately met. These requirement statements are also validated with the customer to confirm that they are correct and do in fact reflect what the customer needs. Once this is accomplished, the requirements are operationally defined in measurable terms and the relationships between the requirements, metrics to be used for measurement, and customer feedback are articulated.

Concept Generation

Stage four of the concept engineering process is built upon the previous three steps and comprises the actual generation of the concept. During this stage, the requirements are translated into solutions. The design problem is decomposed into smaller subproblems that take into consideration both the perspectives of the multidisciplinary design team and the customer and end user. Concepts are often generated at this point using both individual and team efforts techniques such as brainstorming. After a thorough list of ideas has been generated, the ideas are thoroughly reviewed and modified and augmented as necessary to better meet the requirements of the customer. At the conclusion of this stage in the process, each team member derives his or her own ideal solution from the list of ideas.

Concept Selection

The final stage of concept engineering is concept selection. At this point, the alternate solutions generated in the previous stage are reviewed and the best or most appropriate solutions are selected for further development. Expert opinion and help is often sought during this stage to help the design team modify the tentative solutions in order to develop one that will best meet the needs of the customer. These concepts are evaluated in detail against the list of customer requirements and the parameters of the situation in order to make sure that the final solution meets the needs for which it is to be developed.

Conclusion

Concept engineering is a structured process for front end analysis that helps design teams to work with customers in order to translate customer requirements into operational definitions with measurable performance parameters. Concept engineering uses decision aids to collect data and help design teams perform data analysis and interpretation. In particular, concept engineering helps product engineers and design teams understand what is important to the customer, how these concepts will be measured, and how they will be met in the design. The concept engineering process comprises five stages: understanding the customer's environment, converting this understanding into requirements, operationalizing what has been learned, concept generation, and concept selection. By taking such a structured approach and involving the customer at each step of concept development, the concept engineering process helps design teams develop solutions that better meet the requirements of the customer.

Terms & Concepts

Brainstorming: A group process used to generate ideas in a face-to-face group problem solving situation. In brainstorming, team members generate as many ideas as possible, piggybacking on other ideas where possible. The goal of a brainstorming session is to generate ideas so that suggestions are not evaluated during the process.

Concept Engineering: The process of translating customer requirements into operational definitions with measurable performance parameters. In the systems development life cycle, concept engineering (also called system design) occurs after requirements determination and before development and construction.

Decision Analysis: A collection of procedures, methods, and tools used to identify, represent, and assess the important aspects of a decision being considered in a decision making process.

Design Objective Credibility: An abstraction of buy-in and design objective understanding. Design objective credibility is a core variable in concept engineering and helps give development teams direction in the decision making process and more flexibility and confidence in making development decisions.

Front End Analysis: A generic process used to determine the needs and requirements of the customer and how to meet these needs.

Innovation: Products or processes that are new or significant improvements over previous products or processes that have been introduced in the marketplace or used in production.

New Product Development: The application of systematic methods to all processes necessary to bring a new product to the marketplace from conceptualization through marketing. New products can be improvements on existing products or total innovations.

Systems Development: The process of developing a new business system including performing a needs analysis, designing a solution to meet the needs, acquiring the resources necessary to support development efforts, and developing and implementing the solution.

Total Quality Management (TQM): A management strategy that attempts to continually increase the quality of goods and services as well as customer satisfaction through raising awareness of quality concerns across the organization.

Bibliography

Burchill, G. & Fine, C. H. (1997). Time versus market orientation in product concept development: Empirically-based theory generation. Management Science, 43(4), 465478. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=9712042555&site=bsi-live

Howard, T. J., Culley, S. S., & Dekoninck, E. A. (2011). Reuse of ideas and concepts for creative stimuli in engineering design. Journal Of Engineering Design, 22(8), 565-581. Retrieved December 2, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Premier. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=62873468

Sääskilahti, M. (2013). Concept thinking. Journal Of International Business & Cultural Studies, 7 92-97. Retrieved December 2, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Premier. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=86950257

Zavbi, R., Fain, N., & Rihtarši?, J. (2013). Evaluation of a method and a computer tool for generating concept designs. Journal of Engineering Design, 24(4), 257-271. Retrieved December 2, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Premier. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=86153732

Suggested Reading

Jin, G. Q., Li, W. D., & Gao, L. L. (2013). An adaptive process planning approach of rapid prototyping and manufacturing. Robotics & Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 29(1), 23-38. Retrieved December 2, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=79960515

Leonidis, A., Antona, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2012). Rapid prototyping of adaptable user interfaces. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 28(4), 213-235. Retrieved December 2, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Premier. http://search.ebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=72338081

Moura e Sá, P. & Saraiva, P. (2001). The development of an ideal kindergarten through concept engineering/quality function deployment. Total Quality Management, 12(3), 365-372. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=4394664&site=bsi-live

Peña-Mora, F. & Li, M. (2001). Dynamic planning and control methodology for design/build fast-track construction projects. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 127(1), 1-17. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=4125449&site=bsi-live

Steelman, H. S. Jr. (1978). Using a front-end analysis at C&P telephone. Training and Development Journal, 32(6), 48-51. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://searchebsco-host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=9068632&site=bsi-live