Best Fit Product - Emotional Engineering - page 32

10 Breaking in
Breaking in is important to provide the best ! fit feeling. But we do not know how we
can manage to extend the period of feeing of the best ! t. Human-product com-
munication is crucial and in order to establish a better communication, good sensing
technology is called for.
ASICS, for example, is making full use of many different sensing technologies.
As sensing technology is progressing remarkably, we can install suitable sensors.
Next, let us discuss this problem from different viewpoints.
11 Diversi ! cation
When operating conditions did not change appreciably, we could foresee them so
that we could design products that worked best in their practical operating condi-
tions. But situations and environments change extensively and very often these days
and product requirements are diversifying very quickly. Therefore, we cannot
predict the operating conditions any more.
11.1 Space Diversi ! cation: Diversi ! cation of Products
In order to cope with the quickly diversifying customer requirements, engineers
developed a wide variety of products, because they could not predict the operating
conditions. They believed customers could, then, choose what they needed.
But to realize this, they had to build up sophisticated high mix low volume
production system and it takes not only cost and time, but needs high expertise to
run such a system. And to be competitive, they made product lifecycles shorter and
shorter and let customers feel their products were getting out-dated. Thus, more
often than not, it does not satisfy customers enough, but rather keep them always
hungry and unsatis ! ed. This happened because they focused upon space diversi-
! fication, i.e., diversi ! fication, from customer to customer.
But if we look at the problem from another perspective, we realize that it comes
from the diversi ! cation of the use conditions of these customers. The situations and
environments of operating conditions vary extensively and very frequently these
days. Therefore, high mix low volume production is not the ! final answer to
diversi ! cation. We should focus our attention to time diversi ! cation.