Jabarkan Both-ends-against-the-middle design dari Manajemen siklus produk

Both-ends-against-the-middle (BEATM) design is a design process that endeavors to combine the best features of top–down design, and bottom–up design into one process. A BEATM design process flow may begin with an emergent technology which suggests solutions which may have value, or it may begin with a top–down view of an important problem which needs a solution. In either case the key attribute of BEATM design methodology is to immediately focus at both ends of the design process flow: a top–down view of the solution requirements, and a bottom–up view of the available technology which may offer promise of an efficient solution. The BEATM design process proceeds from both ends in search of an optimum merging somewhere between the top–down requirements, and bottom–up efficient implementation. In this fashion, BEATM has been shown to genuinely offer the best of both methodologies. Indeed some of the best success stories from either top–down or bottom–up have been successful because of an intuitive, yet unconscious use of the BEATM methodology. When employed consciously, BEATM offers even more powerful advantages.

Front loading design and workflow

Front loading is taking top–down design to the next stage. The complete control structure and review structure, as well as downstream data such as drawings, tooling development and CAM models, are constructed before the product has been defined or a project kick-off has been authorized. These assemblies of files constitute a template from which a family of products can be constructed. When the decision has been made to go with a new product, the parameters of the product are entered into the template model and all the associated data is updated. Obviously predefined associative models will not be able to predict all possibilities and will require additional work. The main principle is that a lot of the experimental/investigative work has already been completed. A lot of knowledge is built into these templates to be reused on new products. This does require additional resources "up front" but can drastically reduce the time between project kick-off and launch. Such methods do however require organizational changes, as considerable engineering efforts are moved into "offline" development departments. It can be seen as an analogy to creating a concept car to test new technology for future products, but in this case the work is directly used for the next product generation.