COURSE OUTLINE : In the context of product design, it is very important to appreciate the limitations of a design from manufacturing and assembly perspective and to produce high quality products at low cost. This course will introduce methods that can provide guidance to design teams in simplifying product structure to reduce manufacturing and assembly costs, quantify improvements and how robust design concepts can be used for ensuring quality. This course aims at introducing the need to account for variability, mathematically represent it, formulate it and control it. Concepts such as quality, robustness, six sigma and orthogonal array will be discussed