Engineering Entrepreneurship: An Example of A Paradigm Shift in Engineering Education

This paper describes a course on technology‐based entrepreneurship. Brown University's Division of Engineering has created a two‐semester course sequence designed to introduce students to entrepreneurship through a unique merger of classroom learning and industry participation. The course is open to advanced undergraduates from all engineering disciplines, and emphasis is placed upon recruiting almost half of the student participants from outside of engineering in order to develop “team building” skills. Local “parent companies” provide seed ideas or concepts to student groups who use skills learned in the classroom (both in this course as well as other courses) to develop and refine the parent company's idea and turn it into a viable simulated spin‐off business or new start‐up. Managers from the parent companies serve in an evolving role over the two‐semester sequence beginning as a “board of directors” for the spin‐off and eventually evolving into a potential source of start‐up capital (or possibly a customer for the products of the company). The faculty carefully manage the student‐company interface. Deliverables at the end of the two‐semester sequence include a business plan and a prototype product.     

Defining Characteristics for Product Development Using Quality Function Deployment: A Case Study on Indian Bikes

The success of the company lies in understanding the customer preferences and tastes and anticipating the changes required in existing or new products being offered. This study uses a heuristic approach to formulate the problem of product development using a combination of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with quality function deployment (QFD) to evaluate the most satisfying design for customer. A case study for selection of a bike has been presented here to illustrate the proposed approach.

The contributions of the article are (a) structuring of the decision problem for assessment of impact of decisions after identification of customer attributes and preferences; (b) assessing strategies to synthesize qualitative and quantitative factors in decision-making, keeping checks on consistency; (c) using the additive synthesis of priorities to accommodate a variety of interactions and transform multidimensional measurements to unidimensional ratio scale; and (d) assessing the impact of the engineering characteristics weights on the priority of the criteria and overall project (v) Validation of the model using case study.     

Refocusing Our Efforts: Assessing Non‐Technical Competency Gaps

This study reports the findings of a National Science Foundation‐funded study* focused on providing solutions to the identified needs for curricular change in Advanced Technological Education programs. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent of competency gaps in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) education graduates as perceived by business and industry leaders. Due to the nature of the research questions investigated in this study, the methodology was divided into three phases. Phase one employed a widely accepted multi‐step, scale development procedure to determine the domain of the subject matter. Phase two validated survey items. Phase three comprised two parts; part one prioritized SMET competency gaps. Part two utilized Hoshin quality analysis techniques to group, identify, and sequence thematic content areas for curricular development. This study found that SMET programs must extend the boundaries of their traditional curricula to include competencies such as: customer expectations and satisfaction, commitment to doing one's best, listening skills, sharing information and cooperating with co‐workers, team working skills, adapting to changing work environments, customer orientation and focus, and ethical decision making and behavior.     

Maximizing customer satisfaction by optimal specification of engineering characteristics

The House of Quality has been widely discussed as a mechanism for converting customer attributes into engineering characteristics to ensure the design quality of new products and processes. In the past, this process has been subjective and heuristic. In this paper, we present a mathematical programming model for determining the optimal settings for engineering characteristics based on value functions constructed to capture customer preferences. The model can be used with either traditional subjective measures of customer preference or incorporate empirical models based on quantitative data. The robustness of the optimal solution to randomness in parameter estimates is investigated. An example is used to demonstrate the procedure.     

Quality Function Deployment Implementation in Construction: A Systematic Literature Review

The construction of new buildings represents a significant investment. The goal of new building construction is to maximize value and minimize cost while staying on time and within budget. Translating customer requirements into engineering terms for new construction design is vital for a construction project to be successful. Quality function deployment has been successfully used in product development to capture the voice of the customer and translate it into engineering characteristics. Quality function deployment then carries these parameters into production and service to ensure the voice of the customer is being met with the final product. The house of quality, a tool within quality function deployment, can provide a means for comparison of owner’s project requirements and the proposed design, along with identifying how the design decisions impact meeting customer requirements and green building requirements. Quality function deployment can effectively link the project phases through design and construction and into operations and maintenance to ensure the owner’s project requirements are met with the final building. This research identifies and categorizes studies of quality function deployment applications in construction. The research method used is a systematic literature review from databases related to quality function deployment in the construction industry published in the periodicals through 2016. The principal findings of implementations, practices, and integrated approaches are then summarized. This article intends to propel further research of quality function deployment in the construction sector.     

Quality and reliability assessment of hardware and software during the total product life cycle

A major challenge for the computer industry is the need for the development and implementation of an engineering languge which provides continuous linkages and measurement between the customer and all engineering functions internal to the company. Such a language would allow information solution developers and information service providers to be able to continuously monitor the quality and reliability performance of integrated hardware and software products during the complete product life cycle. A quantitative engineering language needs to be developed to provide seamless and continuous linkages between the customer—the user of integrated computer systems—and all of the engineering development and manufacturing functions tasked with designing and building solutions which meet customer needs. A methodology is proposed which addresses this challenge by the implementation of two metrics: total defects per unit (TDU) and the annual rate of events (ARE). These two metrics can measure all hardware, software and computer integration events during the total product life cycle. A methodology is presented which provides a rigorous translation of the ARE metric, monitored at the customer site, into the traditional reliability metrics used by engineering and manufacturing. Algorithms are presented which directly translate AREs into mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time between parts replacement (MTBPR) and mean time between system interruptions (MTBSI). The ARE metric meets the customer requirement of being able to clearly focus on the reliability and availability performance of total systems as a result of hardware and software components, the user interface, and environmental factors. The paper discusses the development and application of integrated TDU and ARE metrics and shows how the total product life cycle quality and reliability of a complex integrated computer and communications solution can be efficiently monitored and managed for improvement during design, manufacturing, and installation performance in an integrated customer environment.     

Bedarf an Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen aus Sicht der Großindustrie in der Oberflächentechnik

Future‐oriented quality production in the surface technology requires more than the accurate fulfilment of the customer requirements. In the external customer‐supplier relationships the co‐workers of large enterprises are increasingly in demand as advisors for their customers, they regularly take part in the product development phase at the customer contribution their know‐how in order to ensure the optimal conditions for the surface treatment. Because of this the importance of social and methodical skills is increasing for technological, technical and high‐level personnel. Personal with these qualifications are hard to find in the job market. The enterprises specialising in surface‐technological services are not even able to cover their needs at a purely technical know‐how level. The consequence: “We have to train the people ourselves”. Training activities initiated by the enterprises are becoming more important parallel to this more is being invested in public relations work and advertising. This conclusion was arrived at after carrying out a analysis of the future training requirements for the large‐scale industry on the basis of four case studies in the mechanical engineering, chemistry, steel industry and automotive industry. The analysis of these case studies is supplemented and rounded off by the postal questioning of a further 28 large‐scale enterprises. The investigation was carried out by the Institute for knowledge transfer at the University of Bremen (IfW) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for education and research (BMBF) by the VDI Technologiezentrum and is a component of the project “Technology transfer surface technology”.     

Improving Product Quality and Reliability with Customer Experience Data

Advance technology development and wide use of the World Wide Web have made it possible for new product development organizations to access multi‐sources of data‐related customer complaints. However, the number of customer plaints of highly innovative consumer electronic products is still increasing; that is, product quality and reliability is at risk. This article aims to understand why existing solutions from literature as well as from industry to deal with these increasingly complex multiple data sources are not able to manage product quality and reliability. Three case studies in industry are discussed. On the basis of the case study results, this article also identifies a new research agenda that is needed to improve product quality and reliability under this circumstance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

QFD optimization using linear physical programming

A new approach to quality function deployment (QFD) optimization is presented. The approach uses the linear physical programming (LPP) technique to maximize overall customer satisfaction in product design. QFD is a customer-focused product design method which translates customer requirements into product engineering characteristics. Because market competition is multidimensional, companies must maximize overall customer satisfaction by optimizing the design of their products. At the same time, all constraints (e.g. product development time, development cost, manufacturing cost, human resource in design and production, etc.) must be taken into consideration. LPP avoids the need to specify an importance weight for each objective in advance. This is an effective way of obtaining optimal results. Following a brief introduction to LPP in QFD, the proposed approach is described. A numerical example is given to illustrate its application and a sensitivity analysis is carried out. Using LPP in QFD optimization provides a new direction for optimizing the product design process.     

Product Evolution: A Reverse Engineering and Redesign Methodology

New products drive business. To remain competitive, industry is continually searching for new methods to evolve their products. To address this need, we introduce a new reverse engineering and redesign methodology. We start by formulating the customer needs, followed by reverse engineering, creating a functional model through teardowns. The functional model leads to specifications that match the customer needs. Depending upon required redesign scope, new features are possibly conceived, or not. Next, models of the specifications are developed and optimized. The new product form is then built and further optimized using designed experiments. An electric wok redesign provides an illustration. The methodology has had a positive impact on results by using a systematic approach, both within design education and industrial applications.     

Proceedings Reviews

Abstract:

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a systematic process for capturing and integrating the voice of the customer into every aspect of the design and delivery of products and services. Understanding customer wants or needs is crucial to the successful design and development of new products and services. QFD is a system that utilizes customer demand information to design products or services that will meet a client's mission. In addition, the process prioritizes and deploys these customer-driven characteristics throughout the product or service development to meet the customer needs, wants, and expectations. QFD determines effective development targets for the prioritized product and service characteristics. The QFD process has been used and documented extensively in product development. The service industry, however, lacks in the application of this process. The purpose of this article is to show practitioners and researchers how this process, in its entirety, can be used as a planning process to link customer requirements and service characteristics in the service industry. A case study was developed in which QFD was applied to develop recommendations for the American Society of Engineering Management (ASEM) in an effort to increase customer satisfaction and to identify opportunities to improve member benefits. The results of this study are applicable to any organization to improve the design and delivery of products and service regardless of industry.     

Integrating Customer Perception into Process Capability Measures

Process capability indices provide a measure of the output of an in‐control process that conforms to a set of specification limits. These measures, which assume that process output is approximately normally distributed, are intended for measuring process capability for manufacturing systems. When the performance of a system results in a product that fails to fall within a given specification range, however, the product is typically scrapped or reworked, and the actual distribution that the customer perceives after inspection is truncated. In this paper, the concept of a truncated measure for three types of quality characteristics is introduced as the key to linking customer perception to process capability. Subsequently, a set of customer‐perceived process capability indices is presented as an extension of traditional manufacturer‐based counterparts. Finally, data transformation‐based process capability indices are also discussed. A comparative study and numerical example reveal considerable differences among the traditional and proposed process capability indices. It is believed that the proposed process capability index for various quality characteristics may more aptly lead to process improvement by facilitating a better understanding of the integrated effects found in engineering design problems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Universal design (UD) principles for flexible packaging and corresponding minimal customer requirement set

Other research has established seven UD principles and performance measures for the design and assessment of generic products. The objective of this research is to improve the suitability of UD for flexible packaging. The methodology used here begins by creating customer requirements from UD performance measures and packaging functions from JIS S 0022‐4. The authors propose a correlation matrix to discard uncorrelated, duplicated and irrelevant requirements from the list of requirements. The remaining customer requirements are screened by using the Index of Consistency. Then, experts check and add essential customer requirements. A factor analysis is conducted on the survey data to find the important requirements and eliminate uncorrelated requirements. The number of customer requirements is reduced from 261 to 39 with five principles corresponding to UD. The five principles relevant to UD are (a) convenient, intuitive and simple use; (b) perceptible information; (c) structure and graphic design; (d) easy opening; and (e) equitable use. The benefit of the new five principles is not only the reduction from seven principles to five principles, but also the grouped customer requirements that are easy to use for packaging manufacturers and packaging designers. Customer requirements can be used as performance measures to evaluate the compliance of flexible packaging to UD. Finally, the application of the five principles and 39 customer requirements are demonstrated with case studies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fuzzy multiple objective decision making approach to prioritize design requirements in quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-oriented design tool for developing new or improved products to increase customer satisfaction by integrating marketing, design engineering, manufacturing, and other related functions of an organization. QFD focuses on delivering value by taking into account customer needs and then deploying this information throughout the development process. Although QFD aims to maximize customer satisfaction, technology and cost considerations limit the number and the extent of the possible design requirements that can be incorporated into a product. This paper presents a fuzzy multiple objective programming approach that incorporates imprecise and subjective information inherent in the QFD planning process to determine the level of fulfilment of design requirements. Linguistic variables are employed to represent the imprecise design information and the importance degree of each design objective. The fuzzy Delphi method is utilized to achieve the consensus of customers in determining the importance of customer needs. A pencil design example illustrates the application of the multiple objective decision analysis.     

利用集成计算方法迈向虚拟产品开发的道路

 满足功效需求的计算机辅助产品开发过程使得提供新的集成软件产品成为必需.然而,由于对产品开发来说不可少的CAE工具缺乏兼容性和集成度,因此出现了很大的问题.利用虚拟产品开发的概念启发了新的思路,可以消除现今CAE应用中普遍存在的缺陷.以一个汽车制造和机械制造配件供应公司里“技术计算”参与部门的开发过程为例,描述了用以优化开发过程且改善与用户之间数字通信的一种方式.     

Application of Small Punch Techniques for the Determination of Gold Mechanical Properties

Abstract: Gold has been one of the most valuable materials since ancient times. These days it is mainly used as a business commodity or as an engineering material in jewellery, medical prostheses (mainly dental) or electronics. For these engineering purposes, knowledge of its mechanical properties is a key factor in order to improve design and performance. The properties of pure gold have already been reported, although the information on them is scarce and indeed no information on properties such as fracture resistance has been found by the authors of this work. Gold alloys, especially those used for dental implants, are better characterised, but the development of new alloys requires a new characterisation of their properties. At the same time, there have been important advances in recent years in the development of non‐destructive or quasi‐non‐destructive techniques for the mechanical characterisation of materials. Among these, the small punch technique has proven to be one of the most reliable and efficient (in terms of material consumption). This technique is here applied for the determination of 24 (pure gold) and 18 (75% gold) carat gold properties, as an example of how this experimental tool is capable and suitable for the characterisation of gold, gold alloys and any other scarce, valuable material. The estimated tensile properties of 24 carat gold correlate well with the values observed in the literature, obtained through traditional test techniques.     

An analysis of the effect of a reliability paradigm shift on leading British aerospace companies

The aerospace industry is moving towards a new paradigm for the statement of reliability specifications. This paradigm is not a technical metric inherent to a system in isolation, but rather encompasses the wider objectives, operational profile and logistic priorities of its customer. This customer focus is encapsulated in the metrics Failure Free Operating Period and Maintenance Free Operating Period. These metrics describe the duration of effective system operation, in the first case for systems where faults and maintenance are permitted and in the second for systems where faults may not be repaired. As part of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) funded Aerospace Project for Insertion of Reliability (ASPIRE) research programme, which itself is part of the Ultra Reliable Aircraft (URA) programme, representatives of leading aerospace companies were interviewed about their opinion n how this new reliability paradigm and associated concepts would affect their way of doing business and their engineering processes. It would appear that the aerospace industry is ready for a move to a more realistic set of reliability metrics and away from the old style MTBF based metrics. This sea change would most likely be welcomed by customers, but as yet the manufacturing companies are unconvinced that such a radical move would be a good thing. Much of the resistance to change is due to old‐fashioned, but well entrenched, beliefs in the traditional way of doing things. A move away from this would bring freshness to the industry and lead to cost and time savings as the traditional approach is dropped in favour of a more planned and thought out approach. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Influence of market orientation on performance: the moderating roles of customer participation breadth and depth in new product development

ABSTRACT

With a greater number of B2B firms integrating customers into the new product development (NPD) process, how to utilize customer involvement in NPD is an important decision because it may be a double-edged sword carrying both bright and dark sides. Utilizing a sample of 193 B2B firms across various industries, we validate previous research that suggests market orientation positively influences NPD performance and subsequently examine how this relationship may either be enhanced or diminished contingent upon how customers are utilized in the NPD process. The results show that the market orientation–NPD performance relationship is enhanced by having customers participate in a greater number of activities throughout NPD (customer participation breadth) and diminished when customers are involved at deeper levels (customer participation depth). This research suggests that the exact involvement of customers is a critical decision and has clear implications for the dialogues about customer involvement and management of customer relationships.     

A Cure for Bioengineering? A New Undergraduate Core Curriculum

Student interest, industry growth, and medical advances highlight a growing need for baccalaureate trained bioengineers. However, undergraduate bioengineering curricula have not kept pace with the recent rapid growth of biotechnology, bioinformatics, and cellular level bioengineering. It is the premise of this paper that a new baccalaureate core curriculum in cell and tissue engineering is needed to foster the full development of bioengineering as a core engineering discipline. Employment opportunities for baccalaureate Bioengineering graduates in the emerging biologically‐based engineering industry (e.g. bioinformatics, cell and tissue engineering, neural engineering) are increasing. We describe a new undergraduate B.S. bioengineering curriculum in cell and tissue engineering with an emphasis in interfacial molecular approaches. This curriculum is integrated with traditional bioengineering topics and has its technical emphasis in molecular biology, nanotechnology, and computational modeling. Thus, the future bioengineer can be expected to design, model, fabricate, and control living systems and their fundamental constituents at the same level of detail as an electrical engineer uses SPICE and CAD tools to develop a microelectronic or micro‐electro‐mechanical device. Such engineers would be expected to take their place in industry, graduate school, or medicine with a clear mastery of cell and tissue‐based bioengineering.     

Recent Progress in Biomimetic Additive Manufacturing Technology: From Materials to Functional Structures

Nature has developed high‐performance materials and structures over millions of years of evolution and provides valuable sources of inspiration for the design of next‐generation structural materials, given the variety of excellent mechanical, hydrodynamic, optical, and electrical properties. Biomimicry, by learning from nature's concepts and design principles, is driving a paradigm shift in modern materials science and technology. However, the complicated structural architectures in nature far exceed the capability of traditional design and fabrication technologies, which hinders the progress of biomimetic study and its usage in engineering systems. Additive manufacturing (three‐dimensional (3D) printing) has created new opportunities for manipulating and mimicking the intrinsically multiscale, multimaterial, and multifunctional structures in nature. Here, an overview of recent developments in 3D printing of biomimetic reinforced mechanics, shape changing, and hydrodynamic structures, as well as optical and electrical devices is provided. The inspirations are from various creatures such as nacre, lobster claw, pine cone, flowers, octopus, butterfly wing, fly eye, etc., and various 3D‐printing technologies are discussed. Future opportunities for the development of biomimetic 3D‐printing technology to fabricate next‐generation functional materials and structures in mechanical, electrical, optical, and biomedical engineering are also outlined.