Mec-B5 — Product Design and Development
Modern tools and methods for creative product design and development involving product research, establishment of design parameters, experimentation, development of conceptual alternatives, visualization, evaluation, revision, optimization and presentation. Particular topics include: The engineering design process, development processes and organizations, product planning, identifying customers’ needs, product specifications, concept generation, concept selection, prototyping, robust design, concept testing, product architecture, industrial design, design for manufacturing, patents and intellectual property, product development economics, and managing projects.
Subject outline
Mec-B5 Product Design and Development is a Mechanical Engineering technical exam (PEO National Examination 16-Mec-B5) on how a product gets from an idea to production: the product development process, its stages, gates and iteration; the team, and the engineer working beside the industrial designer; customer needs, functional and non-functional requirements and target specifications, with the House of Quality and the Kano model; generating, screening and selecting concepts with Pugh and weighted decision matrices, and setting priorities; design constraints, government regulations and standards; product architecture and communicating a design to manufacturing; design for manufacture and assembly (DFM, DFA, DFMA) and the effect of automation; protecting and commercialising an idea in Canada — patents, industrial designs, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets and nondisclosure agreements; and new against refined products, life-cycle cost and keeping a project on track.
The paper is 3 hours and open book; an approved Casio or Sharp calculator is permitted. Question 1 must be completed and is worth 40%; choose four of the six remaining questions, each worth 15%, for a total of 100%. The first five questions as they appear in the answer book are marked. Most questions require an answer in essay format or the use of tables, figures and charts, and clarity and organization of the answer are important — which is why every worked solution in this course carries its own tables and figures. If doubt exists as to the interpretation of a question, submit a clear statement of any assumptions made.
The same subject is also listed as 08-Mfg-B4 under Manufacturing Engineering; the question papers solved here are headed 16-Mec-B5.
What this course gives you
Worked solutions — all fourteen questions from December 2018 and December 2019, seven from each sitting: the compulsory 40-mark Question 1 and six 15-mark questions. December 2018 asks you to improve an office chair, kitchen table or bicycle, then covers the engineer against the artist, the factors that limit a design, protecting an idea, a new product against a refined one, communicating with a manufacturing team that speaks another language, and DFMA; December 2019 updates an aircraft that has not been redesigned for 50 years, then covers government regulations, the first signs that a design project is going badly, nondisclosure agreements and patents in Canada, a functional definition of design, DFM with DFA, and stages, gates and iteration. Both published solutions are typed bullet lists with no tables, figures or numbers. Each published answer is carried here as live text, labelled Published answer, and extended under Added by this pack wherever it misses what the question asks — with 43 tables and 30 figures authored for this course, among them a House of Quality, Pugh and weighted decision matrices, DFA worksheets and stage-gate charts, every number in them recomputed. Every published statement was checked, and six that do not survive checking are flagged at the step that goes wrong, each explained at that point with what to write instead: the December 2018 Question 1 solution answers all three products when the paper asks for ONE, so the model answer carries the office chair through parts A–E and condenses the other two for study; SDL Trados is not a real-time translator (December 2018 Q6); a blended wing body is a new aircraft, not an update (December 2019 Q1); December 2019 Q1(D) asks for the selection strategy to be demonstrated on the three competing solutions and the published answer stops at the strategy, so this course completes it with a Pugh screen and a weighted decision matrix; in Canada the patent test is utility — new, useful and non-obvious — not industrial applicability (December 2019 Q4); and of the duties the published answer lists for a patent holder, only the maintenance fee is actually required (December 2019 Q4). Nothing is silently overwritten. Study notes — ten condensed topics: how this paper is marked and how to answer it; the product development process, its stages, gates and iteration; teams, organisations and the engineer beside the artist; needs, requirements and specifications with QFD and Kano; generating, screening and selecting concepts and setting priorities; design constraints, regulations and standards; product architecture, industrial design and communicating the design; DFM, DFA and DFMA; protecting and commercialising an idea in Canada; and new or refined products, life-cycle cost and keeping a project on track — 26 figures and 15 comparison tables between them, each topic pointing back at the exam questions it answers. Practice & case studies — ten multiple-choice questions and five longer problems — two of them case studies — with worked answers for every one: a cordless drill for first-time home owners set in the Question 1 format, a DFA analysis of a small electronic assembly, protecting and commercialising a new hinge for a Canadian start-up, a folding-frame latch chosen by weighted matrix with a sensitivity check and a tooling break-even, and a slipping development project read through earned value. All fifteen are written for this course; none is taken from the two papers. Formula sheet — two pages, 31 relations in 9 groups: decision-matrix and House of Quality scoring, productivity and value, the Boothroyd DFA index, cost, break-even and learning, life-cycle cost and present value, reliability and risk, PERT and earned value, and the Canadian IP time limits. The paper is open book, so print it and take it in. Printable resources — ten reference sheets — a stage-gate process map, a House of Quality template, a Pugh and weighted matrix template, a specification sheet template, a DFMA checklist with the DFA index, an intellectual property in Canada table, a design constraints and regulations card, a project health and recovery card, a life-cycle cost and present-value factor sheet, and an exam-day strategy card — plus four blank exam stationery templates (answer sheet, rough-work paper, graph paper and isometric paper), each printing on one page. Reference links — twelve selected websites, each with a note on what it is good for: the PEO mechanical exam page, the Engineers Canada syllabus, three CIPO guides (patents, industrial designs, trade secrets), the Patent Act and the Motor Vehicle Safety Regulations, the Ulrich and Eppinger resources, MIT OpenCourseWare 15.783J, Stage-Gate International, ASQ on QFD and Boothroyd Dewhurst on DFMA — and ten YouTube links, each opening a search on one topic this paper examines, from stage-gate and the House of Quality to DFMA, Canadian patents and earned value. Practice papers — the two question papers on their own, unmarked, three pages each, for a timed three-hour run.