(BQ) Part 2 book “Product design and development” has contents: Product architecture, design for environment, design for manufacturing, robust design, patents and intellectual property, product development economics, managing projects, and other contents. | C H A P T E R T E N Product Architecture Courtesy of Hewlett-Packard Company EXHIBIT 10-1 Three Hewlett-Packard printers from the same product platform: an office model, a photo model, and a model including scanning capability. 185 186 Chapter 10 A product development team within Hewlett-Packard’s home printing division was considering how to respond to the simultaneous pressures to increase product variety and to reduce manufacturing costs. Several of the division’s printer products are shown in Exhibit 10-1. Ink jet printing had become the dominant technology for consumer and small-office printing involving color. Excellent black and white print quality and nearphotographic color print quality could be obtained using a printer costing less than $200. Driven by the increasing value of color ink jet printers, sales of the three leading competitors together were millions of units per year; however, as the market matured, commercial success required that printers be tuned to the subtle needs of more focused market segments and that the manufacturing costs of these products be continually reduced. In considering their next steps, the team members asked: • How would the architecture of the product impact their ability to offer product variety? • What would be the cost implications of different product architectures? • How would the architecture of the product impact their ability to complete the design within 12 months? • How would the architecture of the product influence their ability to manage the development process? Product architecture is the assignment of the functional elements of a product to the physical building blocks of the product. We focus this chapter on the task of establishing the product architecture. The purpose of the product architecture is to define the basic physical building blocks of the product in terms of what they do and what their interfaces are to the rest of the device. Architectural .
