Establishing functional requirements and target specifications: A key component of product development projects

Abstract

Two very important steps in the product development process are identifying customer needs and establishing functional requirements and target specifications for the product. Unfortunately, it is quite common in academic design projects to begin a project by giving to the students most of the functional requirements and target specifications for the product that they have to develop. Under that framework, the students are not actively involved in two key aspects of "real world" product development, namely identifying the needs of the customers and translating those needs into functional requirements and target specifications. If the customer requirements are not fully understood and adequately translated into required functions and quantifiable metrics and their corresponding target values, it is very unlikely that a successful product design will result from the development effort. Setting target specifications is a challenging process and even experienced engineers sometimes have difficulties selecting metrics that adequately capture how well a particular customer need is met. Consequently, it is very important that students participating in design projects in product development courses learn structured methodologies to perform those tasks. To explore the benefits of such an approach, a formal process to establish functional requirements and target specifications for a product was introduced into a sophomore product development course, a senior capstone design course sequence, and a graduate level course in product development. In all cases, the students started the task of setting functional requirements and target specifications for the product after following a structured methodology to identify the customer needs. In this paper, the process followed, an assessment of the results obtained and suggestions for future improvement are discussed presenting examples taken from different projects carried out by students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2007.