Importance Of Flexibility In Product Design

Research Paper

Flexibility in Product Design Affect Decision Factor, guidelines and measures

SUBMITTED BY:
DAMINI JAISWAL
ROLL NUMBER – 2016JDS6011

INSTRUMENT DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT CENTER (IDDC)
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, HAUZ KHAS, NEW DELHI Introduction
Flexibility is the quality of bending easily without breaking. It is the concept which is using as a laudable attribute of any a system, a process, an organisation or a product. As flexibility become multi- disciplinary phenomena which use by different persona of different things. Flexibility is something about ability to change therefore it is not like other system performance, and very tough to measure and monitor. Interesting aspect is that how it can be obtain;

8
Very minor A very small change which involves almost no cost 9
No change No effect 10

Flexibility, literally means the ability to be easily modified or the willingness to change or compromise. Hence Product Design Flexibility would literally mean the ability of changing, altering or modifying the design of an already designed product. Design Flexibility is the ability of the manufacturing system to cope with the growing product variety to ensure better system performance; from the same equipment, available. It is the sensitivity of a manufacturing system to changes - the more flexible a system, less sensitive to changes occurring to its environment it is.

Volume flexibility is defined in relation to uncertainty in the level of demand for a product, and is ‘the ability of the system to accommodate shifts in volume for a given part’
- Gupta and Goyal 1989

Volume flexibility of a manufacturing system as ‘its ability to be operated at different output levels’
-Sethi and Sethi 1990

A notion of cost-effectiveness: ‘volume flexibility is the ability to operate efficiently a manufacturing system at varying production

Product flexibility should be sought when the uncertainties in a system’s environment are such that there is a need to evolve the system after it has been fielded to ease market risks, and when the product’s technology base evolves on time scales consider design lifetime and technology obsolescence.

How can the design community tackle flexibility problems? Traditionally, product optimisation has sought to identify the ‘best’ point design given a fixed set of requirements for the entire lifetime of the system. Progress in design flexibility will be made when this principle is relaxed of deterministic optimisation over a single period. when design optimisation is carried out over multiple periods of operation of the system also with multiple sets of requirements.

Occurrence – It is based on the ‘Potential causes of changes’. Occurrence measuring scale is 1-10 where ‘1’ means no or relatively few occurrences and 10 mean that the change is inevitable. Therefore, for minimal design change in future a product must be with low occurrence, which in reduce at some extent redesign cost. So, a product with low Occurrence ranking is more flexible. This probability of occurrence may be determined based on the rate of occurrence of these changes. These changes can be broadly categorized as