The ALPHA Timer Development Project (A)

Roger Terry hurried down the hallway toward the planning meeting for the ALPHA timer product development project. Terry had served as project manager for the initial stage of the ALPHA single-block product development, and he was now preparing to start the follow-on development activities. The ALPHA timer development project was a major effort for Doorley Controls, Inc., to develop a new platform design for its washing machine timer control mechanism. The project was started with a conscious strategy to gain market position with Doorley's key customers: Whirlpool, Maytag, and Frigidaire. The idea was to create a new core product design to take advantage of the recently increased sales volume to Whirlpool. Doorley planned to replace multiple existing timers with a lower cost, single product platform with enhancements. While existing timers were made with numerous plastic and metal parts requiring a lot of hand assembly, the ALPHA would be made mostly of molded plastic parts, assembled by automation. The product concept also included a unique feature called quiet cycle-select, which allowed the user to index the control shaft quietly. The idea for it came out of Doorley's internal quality function deployment analysis (QFD). The results of the ALPHA QFD analysis are shown below.

Questions

1. What features of the timer design appear to offer Doorley the strongest advantages over its competitors' products? What features are apparent weaknesses?

2. Which manufacturing methods are most strongly related to the goal of producing a flexible drive system? Do any of these methods conflict with each other?

3. Which design parameter has the strongest dependence on any of the manufacturing methods?

4. What evidence is there that the ALPHA team has used a DFM approach?