Forming product design specifications

Abstract

Design teams commonly form quantitative functional specification lists that define performance targets for a product. Meeting these specifications ensures that the customer needs are satisfied. A central difficulty is to identify the relevant metrics to use as specifications. A working methodology is presented here to establish relevant, quantitative, measurable performance specifications. To start, customer needs, their importances, and the customer use patterns are gathered for the product. Voice-ofthe- customer methods are augmented to distinguish nocompromise constraints that must be met. Next, a design is analyzed to establish a representative function structure, applying Pahl and Beitz..