Discuss about the fact for Science of Material Selection In Product Design.
Organizational success depends on many factors out of which one of the major factor is related to the products itself. The structure of the product, potential of the product and feasibility are the driving forces of the organization success in a specific market. The assignment is dealing with company named Apple Inc and it newly launched product iPhone 6c in 2016. The focused product iPhone 6c is the updated version of the iPhone series. Like most of the product of Apple, the launch of this new device has created immense buzz among the people all over the world. A record number of units of this product have been sold within the week of its launched. The assignment aims to highlight the product development approach, process, issues and challenges that were faced by one of the top most innovative company in the world Apple. Furthermore, the assignment will describe how launch of a new product can bring detailed information for future steps the company can take to make sure that it is able to meet quality standard of modern day’s expectation. The assignment analyzes the approach for assessment of the success of development process of the product.
The product development process of the Apple Inc. is probably the most successful design process across the globe. As Apple is moving towards becoming the first company in the world with business of more than $1 trillion, there are many things that other organization can learn from Apple Inc and implement into their own businesses (Ashby and Johnson 2013). Product design is one factor that Apple has focuses on immensely to attract its customers. Apple provides complete freedom to its designers to ensure the design of the new products can able meet the objective of the new product launch. According to the Chief Design Officer of the Apple state that the design team of Apple does not have to report to any other team like manufacturing and finance etc. It reflects that designers are set completely free from the budget cost or other factors to get the best design for their new product (Bordegoni and Ferrise 2013). In addition, Apple design team was completely cut off from the rest of the businesses when designing a new product. There are few incidents when Apple management has implemented physical control to prevent its design team to interact with other Apple employees of another team during the day. The design team also removed from the Apple’s traditional hierarchy at this time. The design team of the Apple has developed their own reporting structure and generally report directly to the executive management.
Figure 1: Apple Product Development Process; Source: Brown and Wyatt 2015
The information regarding Apple New Product Process (ANPP) is provided to the product development team when the design team starts their work (Cankurtaran, Langerak and Griffin 2013). The information includes details of every stages of the design process that gives the product development team an idea about the looks of the new product. The idea behind defining each stages of new product development is to give each team relating to new product development an idea about the final product (Chan, Pun and Selden 2013). Executive team of Apple conducts meeting on every Monday to examine each and every product that the organization has in the design phase at that particular point of time.
One major factor of Apple success in new product innovation is that the organization does not take initiatives of launching hundreds of new products at the same time (Gershon 2013). In fact, they concentrated their resources on a handful projects regarding product innovation that are expected to be successful in the near future. Apple’s Monday meeting regarding product innovation is happened in such a way that if a discussion about a new product does not happen in this week, it will automatically be on the top for the next Monday meeting. This reflects management concern over the new product development (Jerrard 2013). It also helps the organization to take decision more smoothly regarding product development process. It ultimately helps Apple to launch their product at the expected time.
After the completion of the design process, engineering program manager (EPM) and global supply manager (GSM) take over from the design team. Their primary job is to ensure that the new products are right away delivered to the market at the right time and at the right cost (Marion, Friar and Simpson 2012). Apple does very small portion of its own manufacturing. It generally outsources contracts to the companies like Foxconn. This approach gives a significant advantage to the Apple to gain more and more share of the market.
Initially, Apple has been famous for its computer business. However, after its initial impact on the market Apple has somehow lost its customers in the next few decades. Thereafter, Apple Inc. hit the bottom line again by introducing a product named iPod that has completely changed the concept of MP3 player (Menguc, Auh and Yannopoulos 2014). Since then Apple has never look back. It introduces many new products in the market such as iPhone, iPad, Macbook etc successfully in the market. The main objective of Apple’s product innovation is to make its existing customer occupy with the most advanced technology in the market. Apple’s product innovation is always the cause of out of the box thinking that completely changed the daily life of its existing customers (Mital et al. 2014). A Product Design Chain concept has been established by the Apple that is concerned with the outsourcing the best and most famous technologies from the leaders of the market. This concept also focuses on the core functionality of the product for introduction of a high quality product that was expected from the Apple Inc. Apple entered into a unique and very controlled Non-Disclosure Agreements with a design development organization named Portalplayer (Moon, Miller and Kim 2013). There are five other key partners of the Apple Inc such as Sony for developing batteries, Wolfsen for developing DAC and codec, Toshiba for developing disk drive, Linear Technology for developing power management gadgets and Texas instruments for developing firewall.
This product design chain allows Apple to minimize its manufacturing costs. As the market leader, reduce manufacturing cost help Apple to sell new products at a good price. It also helps Apple to meets its objective of launching new products (Norman 2013). Since for success of any new product requires a lot of marketing strategies and also the availability of the product in the nearest possible stores. Reduce manufacturing cost allows Apple to invest more in these factors. The marketing strategies of the Apple are normally so good that each of its new products has become hit in the public even before it is launched in the market. Apple aims to provide best technological gadgets to their existing customer and it was reflected in every new launch of the products (Page 2014).
There are mainly eight steps in developing a new product for the customers. The first steps deals with generation of new ideas. For developing a new product, Apple has to analyze, brainstorm and generate idea regarding new product development that can satisfy the needs of the existing customers for the company. The second step is basically screening of the newly generated ideas. In few cases, the generated idea may not be practical for implementation. Hence, it is very important for the Apple to identify the idea that may increase the customer satisfaction. Therefore, the generated ideas have to consider customers expectation, size and growth forecasts of the company, profitability and technical feasibility (Ravasi and Stigliani 2012). The third step deals with the developing the concept and test the concept in the market. Since, it is necessary to understand the immediate impact of the new product launch in the market. The initial feedback of the customers is important to ensure the smoothness of the newly generated ideas. The fourth step analyzes Apple’s business aspect of the new product and its estimated price. Beta test of the new product is the fifth step of product development. This step allows organization to ensure the success of the newly launched product. The Sixth step deals with the technical implementation. The seventh step deals with the commercialization of the new product and the last step relates to the pricing of the new product (Shi et al. 2016).
Four major performance objective factors play important role in determining the design of the new product development of the Apple. Factors like speed, quality, flexibility and cost have huge impact on the design of the new product.
In Apple’s performance objective list, quality is placed at the top of the queue. Since Apple’s management believes that, it is the most important factor of organizations performance objectives. Quality regarding organizations performance objectives is mainly in terms of it meaning ‘conformance’. The most basic definition of quality is a product is at it is supposed to be. Apple’s always focuses on the quality of their products. It aims to provide the best possible item at that price. Since, more often than not design of a new product grabs the attraction of the potential customers. Apple spends huge amount of money in its product design process to gain competitive advantages in the market.
In the organizational performance objectives, the factor speed are actually defines the speed of response. It reflects the time between internal and external customer requesting for a product and they are actually getting it. One of the major factors of Apple’s success is because of their excellent customer services (Simpson et al. 2014). During the time of a new product launch of Apple, the demand for that product is extremely high. Still Apple manages to response to its customers request much faster than its competitors do. This practice by the Apple has major impact on its performance objectives.
Flexibility generally defines organizations adaptation power, i.e., the way organization changes its perspective according to the change in the market. Each and every Apple’s new product are designed and made considering the change in demand of their customers. In fact, some of the innovative product of Apple is far ahead of the generation needs. Products like iPod, iPhone has completely changed the lifestyle of its customers. This flexibility in product design helps Apple to gain majority of the market share. Therefore, it can be said that Apple product design is flexible enough to deal with the market challenges.
Cost is one factor of performance objective that not only can have impact on the performance of the organization but also at the other factors of the performance objectives. Apple focuses on to provide best possible product to the customer at a certain price. However, as discussed earlier Apple does not give too much importance to the cost to develop design for its new products. Still, it does influence the performance objective of the Apple Inc.
Conclusion:
In this current immense competitive market, Apple continues to dominate the industry by introducing new products to the markets. The major reason behind the success of almost each new product of Apple is to able judge rightly about what exactly their customers’ needs. The Apple was introduced in the mobile phone market comparatively late. Today, Apple is able to dominate the industry just because of its innovative and out of the box thinking. Apple’s value innovation focuses on making the competition completely irrelevant by opening up new and untouched markets that create a leap in value for the customers. Products like iPhone, iPad has completely changed the way industry describes new products possibilities and standards. With increasing demand for powerful, high quality, user friendly and cost effective product, Apple is expected to grow with new ideas and innovative thinking. Since, Apple is undoubtedly the leader in the market in terms of bringing these new ideas into the life.
References:
Ashby, M.F. and Johnson, K., 2013. Materials and design: the art and science of material selection in product design. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Bordegoni, M. and Ferrise, F., 2013. Designing interaction with consumer products in a multisensory virtual reality environment: this paper shows how Virtual Reality technology can be used instead of physical artifacts or mock-ups for the new product and evaluation of its usage. Virtual and Physical Prototyping, 8(1), pp.51-64.
Brown, T. and Wyatt, J., 2015. Design thinking for social innovation. Annual Review of Policy Design, 3(1), pp.1-10.
Cankurtaran, P., Langerak, F. and Griffin, A., 2013. Consequences of New Product Development Speed: A Metaâ€ÂAnalysis. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30(3), pp.465-486.
Chan, J., Pun, N. and Selden, M., 2013. The politics of global production: Apple, Foxconn and China’s new working class. New Technology, Work and Employment, 28(2), pp.100-115.
Gershon, R.A., 2013. Digital media innovation and the Apple iPad: Three perspectives on the future of computer tablets and news delivery. Journal of Media Business Studies, 10(1), pp.41-61.
Jerrard, R. ed., 2013. Design management: exploring fieldwork and applications. Routledge.
Marion, T.J., Friar, J.H. and Simpson, T.W., 2012. New Product Development Practices and Earlyâ€ÂStage Firms: Two Inâ€ÂDepth Case Studies. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29(4), pp.639-654.
Menguc, B., Auh, S. and Yannopoulos, P., 2014. Customer and supplier involvement in design: The moderating role of incremental and radical innovation capability. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(2), pp.313-328.
Mital, A., Desai, A., Subramanian, A. and Mital, A., 2014. Product development: a structured approach to consumer product development, design, and manufacture. Elsevier.
Moon, H., Miller, D.R. and Kim, S.H., 2013. Product Design Innovation and Customer Value: Crossâ€ÂCultural Research in the United States and Korea.Journal of product innovation management, 30(1), pp.31-43.
Norman, D.A., 2013. The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. Basic books.
Page, T., 2014. Product attachment and replacement: implications for sustainable design. International Journal of Sustainable Design, 2(3), pp.265-282.
Ravasi, D. and Stigliani, I., 2012. Product design: a review and research agenda for management studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14(4), pp.464-488.
Shi, T., Gu, W., Chhajed, D. and Petruzzi, N.C., 2016. Effects of Remanufacturable Product Design on Market Segmentation and the Environment. Decision Sciences.
Simpson, T.W., Jiao, J.R., Siddique, Z. and Hölttä-Otto, K., 2014. Advances in product family and product platform design. New YorN: Springer.
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