nsumer products consists of the newer models of computer keyboards which are structured to help users avoid repetitive stress injuries and repetitive motion injuries. These keyboards are no longer rectangular but tend to be curvilinear and to include wrist rests to avoid injury. Building in features such as this is clearly a major thrust within manufacturing design processes today (Design for assembly..., 1995).
Economics of Design and Manufacturing
Design is expensive and manufacturing processes are themselves expensive to develop, to maintain, and to use effectively. In the competitive world in which businesses are now situated, companies can no longer afford an ineffective approach to design and manufacturing and instead must incorporate into the design process those components that maximize the ratio of effectiveness to cost where effectiveness is considered the ability of a component or a system to perform its intended function when it is operating in accordance with the original design process (Engineering economics: Analytical design, 2008).
One of the classic examples of inefficiency in the design process from an economic perspective can be found in the traditional design method used by railway engineers working in the 1800s who disregarded the influence of track locations on the prospective costs and revenues of their railways. These engineers simply elected to position tracks in the straightest line possible from one junction to another with little regard for the actual cost of laying the tracks and coping with topographic variations (Engineering economics: Analytical design, 2008).
In the modern design process, planning is key and much of the work takes place early in the process. Most businesses recognize that three measurements of success in the design process are product cost, quality, and time to market (Engineering economics: Analytical design, 2008). About 75 percent of the manufacturing cos...