By Maria Fernanda Laguarda Mallo and Omar Espinoza. University of Minnesota
Wood has played an essential role in the development of civilization for its abundance and remarkable properties. Wood’s intrinsic characteristics make it remarkably flexible and versatile, as being demonstrated …
The U.S. forest products industry has been struggling for over two decades. The rise of electronic media, the globalization of manufacturing, and a declining housing industry have caused significant loss of employment in the industry. Plastic, steel, and hybrid materials …
Identifying customer needs is probably the most important step in the product development process. Only by understating target customers’ needs can the enterprise design a product that fits those needs. Figure 1 illustrates the process to identify customer needs, as …
Probably the most effective tool to translate customer requirements into design and manufacturing specifications is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This method allows to systematically converting customer’s demands into technical requirements, for each stage of product development and production. One of …
Increasing numbers of sophisticated customers are demanding customized goods, and companies are offering a growing number of choices. This presents manufacturers with the challenge of achieving seemingly contradictory goals: produce highly individualized products at a relatively low cost, and in …
Omar Espinoza is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota’s Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering Department.
He also chairs the Forest Products Management Development Institute, an initiative to support the Forest Products Industry in Minnesota.
Omar obtained his undergraduate degree in …
By Omar Espinoza and Maria Fernanda Laguarda-Mallo
The U.S. forest products industry has been facing many struggles during the last two decades. A combination of growing competition from imports, the rise of electronic media, competition from substitute materials, environmental concerns, …
Approximately 25 to 45% of new product projects fail and do not market it to market, and about 46% of the resources spent on development and launch of new products go to ventures that do not succeed [1]. According to …
Every organization has a different product development process, some more structured than others. Furthermore, variations of the product development processes can exist in the same organization for different types of development projects. There are also several frameworks for product development …
There are several tools available for this, but probably the most effective is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This method allows to systematically converting customer’s demands into technical requirements, for each stage of product development and production. One of the greatest …
