Product Design at Regal Marine

VIDEO CASE STUDY PRODUCT DESIGN AT REGAL MARINE The 7-minute video available from Prentice Hall, filmed specifically for this text, supplements the written case. 1.? The concept of product life cycle applies to Regal Marine because Regal is constantly under pressure to introduce new prod-ucts—and those products have life cycles of relatively few years. As the video suggests, it is a matter of typically less than five years before a boat is out of style and its life cycle terminated. This is a long life cycle compared to a newspaper or magazine, but if you are the production manager it seems rather short. 2.? Regal Marine uses a strategy of product differentiation, which constantly introduces new products with new innovations and new styling to stay competitive in the luxury performance boat market. 3.? The cost and time saving at Regal Marine through use of CAD is typical of the use of CAD everywhere. It allows a variety of designs and styles to be tested very economically. The ratio of savings of engineering talent is about four to one. Most important-ly, it allows them to be creative economically and rapidly. 4.? The payoff from CAD is not only evident in efficiency, crea-tive designs, and styling but by production of the code necessary for the numerical machines, such as the machines used to make the plugs in Washington state and for those applications of the numerical control machines at Regal Marine. CAD also provides, as a by-product, very effective and comprehensive documentation of design variables.