engineering

Product analysis

Product analysis is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Product analysis rather than just read about it. In short: Product analysis involves examining product features, costs, availability, quality, appearance and other aspects. Product analysis is conducted by potential buyers, by product managers attempting to understand competitors and by third party reviewers.

Key takeaways

Product analysis belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Product analysis to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Product analysis from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Product analysis involves examining product features, costs, availability, quality, appearance and other aspects. Product analysis is conducted by potential buyers, by product managers attempting to understand competitors and by third party reviewers. Product analysis can also be used as part of product design to convert a high-level product description into project deliverables and requirements. It involves all facts of the product, its purpose, its operation, and its characteristics.

Techniques Related techniques include product breakdown, systems analysis, systems engineering, value engineering, value analysis and functional analysis.

Product breakdown: Recursively divide the product into components and subcomponents. Systems engineering: Ensure that the product satisfies customer needs, cost requirements, and quality demands. Value engineering: Consider alternative designs and construction techniques to reduce cost/increase profit. Value analysis: Assess the cost/quality ratio to ensure that the product is cost effective. Function analysis: Ensure that the product has features appropriate to customer requirements.

Technology analysis

Technological analysis is sometimes applied in decision-making often related to investments, policy-decisions and public spending. They can be done by a variety of organization-types such as for-profit companies, non-profit think tanks, research institutes, public platforms and government agencies and evaluate established, emerging and potential future technologies on a variety of measures and metrics – all of which are related to ideals and goals such as minimal global greenhouse gas emissions – such as life-cycle-sustainability, openness, performance, control, financial costs, resource costs, health impacts and more. Results are sometimes published as public reports or as scientific peer-reviewed studies. Based on such reports standardization can enable interventions or efforts which balance competition and cooperation and improve sustainability, reduce waste and redundancy, or accelerate innovation. They can also be used for the creation of standardized system designs that integrate a variety of technologies as their components. Other applications include risk assessment and research of defense applications. They can also be used or created for determining the hypothetical or existing optimal solution/s and to identify challenges, innovation directions and applications. Technological analysis can encompass or overlap with analysis of infrastructures and non-technological products. Standard-setting organizations can "spearhead convergence around standards". A study found that, in many cases, greater variety of standards can lead to higher innovativeness only in administration. Tools of technology analysis include analytical frameworks that describe the individual technological artefacts, chart technological limits, and determine the socio-technical preference profile. Governments can coordinate or resolve conflicting interests in standardisation. Moreover, potentials-assessment studies, including potential analyses, can investigate potentials, trade-offs, requirements and complications of existing, hypothetical and novel variants of technologies and inform the development of design-criteria and -parameters and deployment-strategies.

See also Product information Quality function deployment Requirements analysis Value engineering

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Product analysis

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Product analysis claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Product analysis before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Product analysis ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Product analysis

In research: Product analysis appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Product analysis in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Product analysis is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Analysis, Product management, Systems engineering, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Product analysis outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Product analysis in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Product analysis means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Product analysis out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Product analysis in simple terms?

Why does Product analysis matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Product analysis?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Product analysis.