Talk:Cordless drill

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Revision as of 03:23, 14 February 2007

We received your report on the cordless drill and were impressed with your work. It is clear that you looked deeply into some areas, although the documentation of product functionality was not sufficient for us to fully understand how the drill functions. The text you provided in section 4.2 was helpful, but it was difficult to relate this to your BOM. A picture of the assembly with labeled components would be a big help. We were unable to tell, for example, how the heat sink attaches to the motor or how the clutch break works – much of the internal functionality is still a mystery to us. A diagram or labeled assembly would be a big help here. Your analyses results are interesting, and we appreciate your initial ideas for improvement. Detailed comments follow:

• Your identification of environmental factors affecting use is interesting. We see this as one possible area of opportunity. For example, you identified limitations for use in wet spaces – is this a need that our customers might have?
• The need for “decent hand strength” is an important opportunity. We designed the second handle into the drill specifically to address this issue. Is there anything we can do to improve here and broaden our market appeal? You identified some opportunities for addressing users with special needs. If you choose to go this direction, make sure you involve some representative users in the process. Your opportunity of difficulty working in tight spaces is interesting – this could be a useful road to pursue.
• Your analysis mentions the “transfer speed to power”. I’m not a mechanical engineer, but I thought that power = torque times speed. I’m not sure what you mean here.
• We found some incomplete sections of the report: You left the text “[Insert more extensive introduction to product dissection here]”, and some photos on the BOM were not available. Was the report you submitted complete?
• We are surprised that you couldn’t find more DFMA opportunities for improvement since there are quite a few parts; although the commonization of fasteners is something we can look into. You didn’t talk about assembly much – mostly your dissection experience – might there be some opportunities here?
• You discuss the clutch break, but I don’t see it in your parts list. What is it – how does it work?
• Your FMEA analysis is interesting, but which recommended actions should we pursue, and how? For example, how might we “redesign brake for longer life”?
• One major DFE concern of ours is that customers want to have the drill ready to use when needed. As a result they either leave the battery on the charger at all times, which wastes energy, or they find that sometimes the battery has an insufficient state of charge at the time they plan to use the product, and the customer is dissatisfied. What can we do here?

Additional Comments

It might be useful if the preface to the parts list had a bit more information about the overall characteristics of the parts. There appears to be a contradiction between the manufacturing section of the Executive summary as compared to the DFE with respect to the different number of screws, and the manner in which they can be consolidated.