Designing New Products: Compatibility with Existing Production Facilities and Anticipated Product Mix Available to Purchase

In many industries, the success or failure of a new product is largely determined in the design phase of the project. Consequently,manufacturers should strive to develop integrated system design tools to help ensure that new products are readily producible according to manufacturing or assembly capability. Introduces a systems integration strategy called “design to fit an existing environment” (DFEE). The purpose of this DFX sub‐strategy is to integrate capacity and product mix issues into design strategies so that it becomes possible to design new products which are more globally optimal from a systems standpoint. The result of using DFEE is that better product time‐to‐market targets can be established, and products can be designed to take advantage of existing slack manufacturing capacity, thus balancing assembly flow and reducing capital expenditures.