Balancing Marketing and Manufacturing Objectives in Product Line Design

The product development process involves communication and compromise among interacting and often competing objectives from marketing, design, and manufacturing perspectives. Methods for negotiating these perspectives play an important role in the process. For example, design for manufacturing (DFM) analyses aim to incorporate manufacturing requirements into product design decision making to reduce product complexity and cost, which generally increases profitability. However, when design characteristics have market consequences, it is important to quantify explicitly the tradeoffs between the reduced cost and reduced revenue resulting from designs that are less expensive to manufacture but also less desirable in the marketplace. In this article we leverage existing models for coordinating marketing and design perspectives by incorporating quantitative models of manufacturing investment and production allocation. The resulting methodology allows a quantitative assessment of tradeoffs among product functionality, market performance, and manufacturing costs to achieve product line solutions with optimal profitability.