USE OF A STRUCTURED ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESS IN EXPANDING MARKETS OF SME'S

EGPR (European Global Product Realisation) is an undergraduate group design project for final year engineering students at City University. The learning outcomes of this project are to equip students with the necessary skills to approach real design problems in a systematic way using a structured engineering design process. It is understood by the participating students that this process can increase the ability of companies to expand their existing market share by identifying possible niches through novel designs of their existing product line. Many Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) yet fail to implement such an approach in daily practice. In order to learn the engineering design process through an application in industry, the EGPR team conducted a design exercise aimed at creating conceptual designs of fencing systems with the objective of expanding the market of their UK based industrial partner. Various methods for specifying suitable functions to conceptualise upon were used and compared. Although the scale of the students’ work was not sufficiently large and time was too short to assess the commercial value of the designs, we feel the work is of value for the ‘platform’ it provides for a proactive approach to meeting customer requirements.