Quantitative Assessment Framework for Product Value and Change Risk Analysis in Early Design Process

The ever changing trends in current markets along with customers’ rising demands for quality require many companies to make frequent changes in their products. In this paper, a framework for a comprehensive Decision Support System (DSS) is described and illustrated with a simple example of a thermo-flask. The DSS aims to obtain an optimal balance between customer and enterprise satisfaction by taking into account different design decision attributes: customer requirements, cost and design risk. The system allows the recalculation of cost, value, effort and risk when engineering change occurs during the creation of new design solutions. The proposed DSS integrates House of Quality (HOQ), Functional Analysis System Technique (FAST), risk assessment and change propagation analysis to provide a view of the design process from product attributes and design risk to cost and effort. The goal is to increase product knowledge in the early stages of design, to calculate the effects of engineering change, and to support design engineers in decision making.