Graduate students experience product development
Brandt Urban, MBA 2
Issue date: 12/5/05 Section: News
On Wednesday, November 30, the eight teams participating in the Integrated Product Development (IPD) course, which requires students from the RSB, the College of Engineering, and the School of Art & Design to draw, manufacture, and market a new product, presented their offerings at the end-of-term trade show.
For this year's IPD course, the student teams were asked to design a product "that supports the use of mobile technology in a student setting," according to the Tauber Manufacturing Institute's web site.
The student teams were evaluated based upon overall profitability of their products. Revenues were calculated based upon consumer rankings from both an online trade show and a live trade show. In both trade shows, customers were asked to rank the products based upon the price and attributes that the teams set. The rankings then translated into order volumes and revenues.
Fixed and variable costs were calculated based upon the cost structure of each team's product. However, the cost structure only focused on the production of the product and did not include selling and administrative costs, according to MBA2 and member of the Nomad team Greg Smelzer.
The teams also had to plan inventory levels for both the online and live trade shows. Depending on how aggressive the teams were in their inventory planning, they could either help or hurt their performance since remaining inventory costs were subtracted from revenues. However, the trade shows were not simultaneous, so the teams could use the response from the initial online trade show to help plan for the live one.
"Because the winning product has the highest amount of income, not just the most votes, everything had an impact on the success of the product… Market research, customer needs, fixed costs, variable costs, design trade-offs, product features, inventory levels. We looked at all of that," Smelzer said.
According to MBA2 and member of the winning Jumpstart team Aram Mazmanian, the most educational part of the project was "taking a holistic approach to the idea development, building, marketing, and selling [of a product] and understanding the relationships between these steps."
For this year's IPD course, the student teams were asked to design a product "that supports the use of mobile technology in a student setting," according to the Tauber Manufacturing Institute's web site.
The student teams were evaluated based upon overall profitability of their products. Revenues were calculated based upon consumer rankings from both an online trade show and a live trade show. In both trade shows, customers were asked to rank the products based upon the price and attributes that the teams set. The rankings then translated into order volumes and revenues.
Fixed and variable costs were calculated based upon the cost structure of each team's product. However, the cost structure only focused on the production of the product and did not include selling and administrative costs, according to MBA2 and member of the Nomad team Greg Smelzer.
The teams also had to plan inventory levels for both the online and live trade shows. Depending on how aggressive the teams were in their inventory planning, they could either help or hurt their performance since remaining inventory costs were subtracted from revenues. However, the trade shows were not simultaneous, so the teams could use the response from the initial online trade show to help plan for the live one.
"Because the winning product has the highest amount of income, not just the most votes, everything had an impact on the success of the product… Market research, customer needs, fixed costs, variable costs, design trade-offs, product features, inventory levels. We looked at all of that," Smelzer said.
According to MBA2 and member of the winning Jumpstart team Aram Mazmanian, the most educational part of the project was "taking a holistic approach to the idea development, building, marketing, and selling [of a product] and understanding the relationships between these steps."
