Course abstract

Competition in the key word in today’s business environment. The major objective of the companies worldwide is to conceptualize, design and develop products that not only satisfy the customer’s needs and wants but also are competitive from cost as well as quality point of view. But it has been observed that our product design and development cycle usually follows a traditional/conventional approach that leads to a lot of non-value added features in the product. Moreover, these features also increase the manufacturing cost of the product. Therefore, there is an imminent need to acquaint the engineers and managers with the concept of design thinking that involves an integrated approach of combining the functions of design and manufacturing (including assembly). The integrated approach will certainly help the product designers to come up with designs that satisfy the customer requirements, offer good quality in terms of service and maintenance and are easy to manufacture at reasonable cost. The course contents will certainly add value to the knowledge base of the product and process designers and will definitely orient their thought process in the direction of integrating the manufacturing function with the design stage of the product development cycle.