Product and Service Design This weeks course materials present examples of how integrating product and service design into your pursuit of operational excellence can be an effective strat

Product and Service Design

This week’s course materials present examples of how integrating product and service design into your pursuit of operational excellence can be an effective strategy to increase your organization’s competitive advantage. Support your response to the prompts below with specific references to this week’s course materials.

Identify two articles or videos from this week’s materials that you found to be most useful. What were your takeaways from these? Why?
Select any product or service that you are familiar with, either as a provider or as a consumer. Describe how effective its design is in meeting customer needs.

Post your initial response by Wednesday, midnight of your time zone, and reply to at least 2 of your classmates’ initial posts by Sunday, midnight of your time zone.

Melaine,

Good afternoon Professor and class –

From the Harvard Business Review article, the concept of design thinking caught my interest. A disciplined method offered by design thinking enables innovators to escape unproductive habits that stifle creativity. Design thinking is a social technology, similar to Total quality management, that combines valuable tools with knowledge of how people think (Liedtka, 2018). Design thinking is a philosophy that has been quickly embraced by some of the most well-known companies in the world, like Apple and Samsung. Understanding the consumers, questioning assumptions, revamping challenges, and creatively generating ideas you can design and test are all steps in the iterative design thinking process. The main objective is to find alternative approaches and answers that take time to be obvious, given your current level of comprehension.

Under the design thinking process, the immersion concept is the other takeaway from the course article. A notable factor is that business innovators face the problem of over-relying on their expertise and experience. Design thinking provides immersion in consumer experience, resulting in shifting in the innovators’ mindset regarding a comprehensive understanding of the consumers being designed for.

As a consumer, the Samsung Z fold smartphone’s product design is effective. This product design is effective in the following way. Samsung raised the size of the cover screen while maintaining the exact dimensions as the smartphone to improve users’ experience when using the phone when folded. The shapes of the smartphone, the color and shine of the coating, and every other surface have all been meticulously crafted by Samsung designers to appear and feel luxurious.

Reference

Liedtka, J. (2018). Why design thinking works. Harvard Business Review, 96(5), 72-79.

2nd person

Faith

Faith Sheppard RE: Week 9 DiscussionCOLLAPSE

Hello Professor and class I chose the two LinkedIn learning platforms because they are very interesting to me, and this is what I am currently working on in my current role. I received this job and was very excited about it, but only to find out there was only bare minimum things done. The workers feel no compassion from the company they think they are just a number, and nobody cares about them. There are many process that have been put on the back burner. Some of the process that are not keep up with can cost our company a lot of money if we are fined. I am trying to get things back on track to make sure we are complaint, doing the right thing, and making sure our employees feel needed and valued. I think if the employees feel like they are valued then they would work harder for you to help improve customer satisfaction. With my company we have been one to set the milestone for differentiation. We are big on differentiation because we are the only company that has special made trailers that gives us the ability to haul more oversize tires. Most companies only can haul four when we can double it and haul up eight. With us being able to haul more tires than the average customer we keep the customers happy and the products rolling.

LinkedIn Learning: DMADV: Design for Six Sigma

LinkedIn Learning: Tim Brown: Use Design Thinking Everywhere

JWI 550: Operational Excellence Week Nine Lecture Notes

JWI_550_Week_9_Lecture_Notes_1208.pdf

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JWI 550: Operational Excellence

Week Nine Lecture Notes

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CUSTOMER-FOCUSED DESIGN

What It Means Product and service designs are strategic decisions that impact an organization’s entire value chain and its competitive advantage. Effective designs are the result of the designers’ sensibility and methods matching customers’ needs with what is technologically feasible. Various customer-focused design methodologies, including Design for Six Sigma (DMADV), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and Design Thinking, are used successfully in many organizations today. They all seek to develop a viable business strategy that can be leveraged to solve operations management problems and create customer value and market opportunity. Why It Matters

• Successful design efforts need a willingness to apply a new lens and take a fresh look – whether you are designing or redesigning a new process, product, or service.

• The right design can drive the success of a product or service and help you win customers.

• Different customer-focused design approaches impact the value chain in different ways.

“Innovation is not necessarily about Eureka; it can be about consistent and regular improvement, but it’s always

about listening to your customer.”

Jack Welch

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THE CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY FOR MANAGERS

Managers should seize every opportunity to ensure that designs are customer-focused. When we say “customers,” we refer not just to the paying or external customers, but also internal customers (i.e., those within the organization). The good news is that there are various methodologies, tools, and techniques – such as Design Thinking, Design for Six Sigma (DMADV), and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) – to help ensure customer- focused designs. You will learn about these this week. The challenge is for managers to correctly identify opportunities for design projects or redesign projects. If customer needs are not met by anything that your organization offers, then there is probably a business case for a new service, product, or process. If an existing service, product, or process is so broken that it cannot be improved upon, then a redesign is needed. Managers have to select and consciously decide to launch such projects. Managers need to assign the right personnel and resources to cross-functional projects. Design or redesign projects take longer than improvement projects. Depending on the nature of the service, product, or process, such design projects may take weeks, months, or even more than a year. Therefore, these projects should be viewed in the larger strategic context as an investment to gain competitive advantage.

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YOUR STARTING POINT

1. How good are you at stepping out of your comfort zone and considering new approaches to

solve problems?

2. Can you think of a situation in your business where poor design choices resulted in products or

services that failed to meet customer needs and expectations?

3. What are the “right features” for your product or service? How do you determine this?

4. How important is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) in the design decisions your business makes?

5. Do you look to other sectors and businesses for new ideas?

6. What are three well-designed products or services that you use on a regular basis? What makes them so appealing?

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THE STRATEGIC DECISION OF PRODUCT DESIGN

More than ten years ago, Nokia – the designer of some of the most robust and well-known wireless phones of the early 21st century – introduced what should have been a tremendous hit: a mobile phone that was also a gaming platform. The result was one of the most epic disasters in the history of design.

It was called the N-gage. It was ugly; many users said it “looked like a taco.” The phone buttons were poorly suited to gaming, and it suffered other design issues. For example, to change games, you actually had to remove the phone’s battery. Nokia subsequently redesigned the N-gage, but the damage was done. The phone was discontinued in 2005, a commercial failure that is frequently cited as one of product design’s most glaring examples of what not to do.

Throughout most of history, design was a process applied to physical objects, from buildings and vehicles to phones and computers. Raymond Loewy designed trains, Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses, Charles Eames designed furniture, Coco Chanel design haute couture, Paul Rand designed logos, and David Kelley designed products, including the mouse for the Apple computer.1

Today, design encompasses not just physical objects, but also intangibles, such as services and the user experience. Design is one of the ten strategic decision areas in operations management. Decisions made in the selection, definition, and design of goods and services have a significant impact on the competitive position of a business entity.

COMPETING ON DIFFERENTIATION, COST LEADERSHIP, AND RESPONSE

For convenience, we will use the term “product” throughout this lesson to refer to both goods and services. In the context of operations management, product design should support the company’s competitive priorities. These priorities may be based on differentiation, cost leadership, or response.

• Differentiation focuses on setting the company’s product or service apart from competitors based on factors other than cost, such as quality.

• Cost leadership means striving to achieve the lowest operational cost possible in order to position your company for competitive advantage.

• Response means operating a business entity in a way that leaves it flexible to respond quickly to changes in customer demand.

For example, Taco Bell has developed and executed a low-cost strategy through product design, offering very low-cost food. The restaurant’s menu changes from time to time, but overall, it offers more or less 1 Tim Brown and Roger Martin, “Design for Action,” Harvard Business Review, September 2015.

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the same food now as it did several years ago. By contrast, Toyota prides itself on rapid response to changing consumer demand by executing the fastest automobile design in the industry.

THE RIGHT FEATURES, FREE FROM DEFECTS

Product design decisions should result in providing the right features to customers, free from deficiencies. The right features are what customers want and for which they are willing to pay. These features function as planned without defects – a concept derived from the teachings of Dr. Joseph M. Juran. Whether you are selling a Rolls-Royce or a Kia, whether you work for Ritz-Carlton or Motel 6, this definition holds the key to your company’s success.

In a 2015 HBR interview, Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, explained that a well-designed product is one you fall in love with. “We had to rethink the entire experience,” she explained, “from conception to what’s on the shelf to the post-product experience.” She went on to add, “In the past, user experience wasn’t part of our lexicon. Focusing on crunch, taste, and everything else now pushes us to rethink shape, packaging, form, and function…We’re forcing the design thinking way back in the supply chain.”2

In order to provide the right features, the ones customers will fall in love with, a business must know what customers want. Previously, you learned about Six Sigma and the design methodology DMADV. One of the first steps in DMADV is to understand the Voice of the Customer. You must also determine the true needs and expectations of your target customers, then translate those needs into the design.

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT (QFD)

A process that is widely used to translate customer needs into a product’s critical to quality CTQ functions and features is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a planning tool or process for determining customer requirements. It enables business leaders to translate these attributes into attributes each functional area can understand— and which they can act on.

QFD ensures that the customer has a voice in the design specification of a product. Many design efforts, including DMADV projects, use the planning matrices adapted from QFD. The flow of these design matrices is as follows:

1. Customers to needs 2. Needs to CTQs 3. CTQs to functions needed to satisfy those CTQs 4. Functions to features that enable those functions 5. Features to processes capable of delivering on those features

2 Adi Ignatius, “How Indra Nooyi Turned Design Thinking into Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, September 2015.

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MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONS

Product design is a strategic decision. It drives and impacts the entire value chain of the company, including company operations and the business entity’s supply chain. The right design can ensure the success of a product, while the wrong design will surely mean its failure.

Poor design choices lead to poorly designed products. These will not be products that consumers want; they will not be goods and services for which your customers will be willing to pay. To avoid the early or otherwise untimely demise of your company, and to properly position yourself and your business for competitive advantage, you must take proper design into account.

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SUCCEEDING BEYOND THE COURSE

As you read the materials and participate in class activities, stay focused on the key learning outcomes for the week and how they can be applied to your job.

• Explore the principles and application of Design Thinking Design Thinking uses creative activities to foster collaboration and solve problems in human- centered ways. The 3 core activities of Design Thinking are inspiration, ideation, and implementation. According to Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, “The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.”3

• Explain how the Voice of the Customer should drive design strategy Design for Six Sigma is a project methodology for the design or redesign of products, services, and processes. Your organization can benefit from this by using the VOC and DMADV – Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify – to ensure that customer needs are understood and translated into the functions and features of the design.

• Describe how Design for Six Sigma implements customer-focused design “Traditionally, designers focused their attention on improving the look and functionality of products…Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking – inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential – addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it. “Businesses are embracing design thinking because it helps them be more innovative, better differentiate their brands, and bring their products and services to market faster. Nonprofits are beginning to use design thinking as well to develop better solutions to social problems. Design thinking crosses the traditional boundaries between public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.”4

3 Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, “Design Thinking for Social Innovation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2010. 4 Ibid.

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ACTION PLAN To apply what I have learned this week in my course to my job, I will …

Action Item(s) Resources and Tools Needed (from this course and in my workplace) Timeline and Milestones Success Metrics

USEFUL NOTES

Select any product or service that you are familiar with, either as a provider or as a consumer. Describe how effective its design is in meeting customer needs.

Introduction

Customer needs are at the heart of every business. They should be identified and understood by all stakeholders, from customers to employees. This allows businesses to provide products or services that meet customer needs as well as identify gaps between what is offered and what is needed.

Identify the key needs and pain points of customers interacting with the product or service.

In order for a design to be effective, the customer needs to be at the center of it. This means that the customer needs to be able to easily find the information they need and use it effectively. They also need to feel like their voice was heard when making decisions about how your product or service should work, as well as trust that this will actually happen.

Take into account the different roles, contexts, and scenarios that represent the range of customer needs (e.g., roles such as customers, sales staff, logistics staff; contexts such as web interface, airport check-in line, store shelf)

The design of any product or service must take into account the different roles, contexts, and scenarios that represent the range of customer needs (e.g., roles such as customers, sales staff, logistics staff; contexts such as web interface, airport check-in line).

If you’re evaluating some kind of software solution to improve your business processes or workflow efficiency—say an ERP platform intended to help manage inventory—you might want to consider how well it would work with each function within your company (e.g., finance). If you’re evaluating an e-commerce site like Amazon Marketplace for selling products through third party vendors on behalf of those vendors’ customers looking for those products themselves instead of buying directly from a supplier at regular prices or higher ones (and receiving orders quickly via email), then perhaps look at whether there’s anything else missing from either side: information about shipping costs between countries; tracking numbers provided by both parties so they know what items are available now without having to wait until someone ships them back out again after paying all upfront fees upfront); etcetera…

To evaluate effectiveness, you may use any quantitative or qualitative method you consider appropriate (e.g., expert analysis, interviews with stakeholders or customers, observation of actual usage by customers).

Quantitative Methods:

You can use numbers to measure the effectiveness of a design. These include:

How many people have bought your product/service?
What percentage of users (or customers) are returning after their first purchase?
Qualitative Methods:
*Interviewing stakeholders and customers will give you insights into their needs and how they perceive your product/service. Interviews can be conducted by phone, email or in person at an event where you present your products or services. You should try to make sure that each interviewee has enough time to explain their opinions fully so that you understand what makes sense for them as well as why it does not make sense for others who might also benefit from using such a product/service

Identify gaps in your design between what is offered and what is needed. Explain how these gaps will affect customer experience.

Now that you’ve identified the gaps in your design, explain how these gaps will affect customer experience. For example, if a product isn’t designed for specific needs of a customer but instead offers general solutions to their problems and cannot be customized based on those needs, then there could be a negative impact on their experience with the product or service. In addition, if a company doesn’t understand its customers’ requirements or expectations (or why they are using products), then it might not develop products that meet those needs and expectations as well as possible.

Customer needs are at the heart of every business.

Customer needs are at the heart of every business. They should be at the core of any business, and they should be what your company focuses on most.

How do you define a customer need? A customer need is something that your customers want or need and will pay money for, in order to satisfy those desires or needs. Some examples might include:

A product that makes dinner easier than cooking it yourself
A service that helps you find a job after college graduation

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have illustrated how the needs of your customers are at the heart of every business. By taking time to understand them, you will be able to develop products and services that meet their exact needs, which in turn will increase customer loyalty and engagement with your brand.