In a recent article, I raised two points about specifications 1) Make sure your specification is clear to you, and 2) Make sure your specification is clear to your manufacturing partner. You have to know what you want, and convey that clearly to your supplier. But what is a good specification, and who writes them?
In future posts, we’ll delve deeper into what makes a good specification. We’ll explore inputs and outputs and features of good specs. For now, I’d like to discuss the various types of specs and who is involved with developing them. I had a boss in a previous job who was a real purist with respect to separation of marketing, design, and manufacturing information. While it was sometimes frustrating to argue what belonged where, the exercises really got to the bottom of who needs to know what to get their job done. (Thanks, Fred!)
Whether your organization breaks specifications into marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and test specs, or lumps them all together into a general product specification, they will all contain the same major elements, which will likely be authored by the same group of people. Let’s explore those major elements:
1) Marketing. Product managers, marketers, and salespeople work together to produce the marketing specification. This spec distills customer expectations into list of requirements. It will include the following: performance requirements; cost targets; geographic regions into which the product will be sold; trade dress such as color, shape, weight and packaging appearance; estimated sales volumes; life expectations; usage expectations (toughness, durability); maintanance expections; and competing products.
2) Engineering. Starting with the marketing information, engineers will intrepret each of the requirements into a technical specification. For example, if the product will be sold in Arizona, this will give the design engineers information needed to specify operating temperatures (it must operate when it’s really hot!), shipping requirements (must survive a truck journey from point of manufacture to end user), regulatory requirements (what does the US government and the Arizona government require for this product), and input power requirements. The engineers will interpret customer requirements such as “must remove all air from the bag within two minutes” into technical requirements such as “must reduce pressure inside the bag to less than 1 psia within two minutes, requiring a flow rate of 45 scfm.” Likely benchmarking tests will be required to determine these specs. Sometimes combined with the engineering specification is the test specification — not manufacturing tests, but the tests necessary to determine if the design meets the requirements outlined in the specification. The engineering specification will also include a bill of materials. The output of the engineering effort, is the engineering data package (design details).
3. Manufacturing. Manufacturing engineers, assisted by quality control, logistics, and engineering, convert the engineering data package into a manufacturing data package, or manufacturing specification. This describes how each part on the bill of material will be made, and to what tolerance, to insure that the finished product meets the engineering specification, and hence the marketing specification. This specification will include material and time usage, machines that will be used in the manufacture, any special tooling that is required, and what tests will be performed to insure compliance.
Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll discuss more about specifications, and what information is critical for you to know before you begin your China sourcing project.
