1. Relevant considerations in planning a product or service system include: research, design, production, life cycle, safety in use, reliability, maintainability, regulatory and legal problems.

2. A marketable product is not always profitable. The reasons for this include:

1. poor design that leads to an unsafe product may violate product codes or cause accidents that will result in future product liability lawsuits.
2. the development may take so long that the product is being marketed past the time of peak demand.
3. competition may result in obsolescence.

3. There are five stages to the product-demand life cycle: incubation, growth, maturity, saturation and decline. The production/operations system becomes an active participant early in the cycle, because of the need to plan production facilities.

4. Basic research is research that contributes knowledge but not products directly; applied research contributes knowledge about products; development contributes products; production/operations management delivers the products.

5. Computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD-CAM) enhance the productivity of both design and production personnel, because the computer can assimilate enormous quantities of information, display the consequences of a design or a course of action, and institute programmed controls of the manufacturing process.

6. Standardization of parts, components, and modularization, or standardizing larger components that might be used in several different products, has advantages for many reasons, including: reducing inventories; enhancing employee, customer and vendor familiarity; making it easier to purchase raw materials and component parts; and routinizing production and quality assurance activities. There are also some possible disadvantages in reduced consumer appeal and possible freezing of imperfect designs, with subsequent costly changeovers.

Some companies are offsetting the lack of variety through mass customization, which involves adding a small degree of customization to standardized goods and services. One approach is delayed differentiation, which involves producing but not quite completing a product or service until customer preferences are known. Another approach is modular design, which involves standard modules (groups of parts or services) which can be assembled in several different ways (or used or not used) to achieve variety.

7. An important aspect of the design process is to design for manufacturability. This means avoiding designs that would require costly or time-consuming steps, or steps that would make it difficult to achieve desired quality levels. Instead, designers need to be aware of manufacturing capabilities, and create products that are easy to produce, and lend themselves to achieving desired quality levels.

8. The design of services differs in many respects from the design of products, because of certain basic differences that exist between products and services. For example, services tend to have higher customer contact than manufacturing, and services tend to be intangible. Also, services can't be inventoried. Because of these and other differences, the design of services requires attention to many different details than design of products.

9. Robust design refers to products or services that are relatively insensitive to some change in operating conditions. That is, products (or services) with robust design have a broader range of conditions under which they can function in an acceptable manner than products (or services) that do not have this feature. That can be a real advantage in terms of reliability and customer satisfaction.

10. The product designer has an ethical obligation to design products and services so as to avoid damaging or polluting the environment, to employ safe manufacturing processes, and to assure that the product is harmless in its intended uses.

11. Reverse engineering refers to the dismantling of another firm's product to learn about any special features that can be adapted to one's own products.

12. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a process for integrating the "voice of the customer" into the design of products and services. This intention is to achieve increased levels of customer satisfaction by incorporating customer requirements at the earliest possible stage in the production cycle.

13. Cost and environmental concerns and government regulations have led many companies to design products so that various parts can be recycled (i. e. crushed, melted, etc. and reused in new ways). Still other companies are remanufacturing products, which involves refurbishing used products and then reselling them.