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Abstract
In this era of stiff competition the economic success of manufacturing firms depends on their ability to identify the
needs of customers and to quickly create products that meet these needs and can be produced at low cost.
Achieving these goals is not solely a design problem or a manufacturing problem; it is a product development
problem involving all of these functions. The present work is carried out in a manufacturing unit, developing
industrial products. In its product range the company involves the manufacture of key duplicating machine on small
basis and this machine required improvement to survive in competitive market (key making). The paper highlights
how the product development techniques are applied in improving the key duplicating machine effectively and
efficiently. The present paper discuses about the re-designing and improvements in the product performance. The
work was further extended for developing a revised product with better features. The scope of work involves
extensive survey of users and design options available. The significant aspect of the present work is that, the
theoretical concepts involved in product development have been realized with a practical perspective. The work
has been realized by incorporating these improvements in the product. The work is supported by digital prototyping
of the model using CAD modeler.
Key words: Product Development, Performance, re-designing.
PRODUCT RE-DESIGNING AND DEVELOPMENT OF
KEY DUPLICATING MACHINE – A CASE STUDY
12 3
Deshpande A.S. , Chate U.N. , Vinayak Malik
1Fr.C.Rodrigues College of Engineering, Mumbai, India
2,3Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Gogte Institute of Technology, Belgaum, India
1
E-mail: asd@fragnel.ac.in
I. INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL BACKGROUND
There is a great demand for key duplication in
market. The conventional method of making duplicate of a
key is by using files and bench vice. The original key and
the new key blank of its shape are held in vice, set properly
and the required profile is generated using files. This
process requires a lot of efforts, time and personnel skill.
In the recent time the key duplicating work is made
easier, quicker and without much efforts by the use of key
duplicating machines. One of such machines is
manufactured by Tool Holders Pvt. Ltd at Belgaum.As per
the needs of customers and to meet the new changes in
market of key making the machine required improvement.
To solve this problem, the machine was developed, by
following a structured product development process.
Fig. 1 shows the picture of existing model of key
duplicating machine, which has to be improved.
Fig. 1. Existing model of key duplicating machine
52 International Journal on Design and Manufacturing Technologies, Vol.2, No.1, July 2008
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY
APPLIED FOR KEY DUPLICATING MACHINE
IMPROVEMENT
A product is something sold by an enterprise to its
customers. Product development is the set of activities
beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and
ending in the production, sale and delivery of a product.
Few products are developed by a single individual
and the current case of key duplicating machine is a good
example of this. To improve the key duplicating machine a
structured product development methodology is used,
which contains the following steps
lProduct planning
lConcept development
a) Identifying customer needs
b) Establishing target specification
c) Concept generation
d) Concept selection
e) Concept testing
f) Establishing final specification
l Re-design of key duplicating machine
In this section, how product development steps are
applied in the current case of key duplicating machine
improvement is discussed. The product planning process
takes place before a product development project is
formally approved, before substantial resources are
applied.
Since the key duplicating machine development
project is carried out individually there is no task to be
performed for forming a product development team. In the
current project of key duplicating machine development,
there was not much work involved to decide which product
has to be developed, since it was already asked to make
improvements in key duplicating machine. So the next
step in product planning phase was to make a mission
statement for the current project. But before preparing the
mission statement for key duplicating machine project lets
have a brief idea about the types of development project.
TYPES OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
Product development projects can be classified as four
types:
lNew product platforms: These types of project
involve a major development effort to create a new
family of products based on a new, common platform.
The new product family would address familiar
markets and product categories.
lDerivatives of existing product platforms: These
projects extend an existing product platform to better
address familiar markets with one or more new
products.
lIncremental improvements to existing products:
These projects involve adding or modifying some
features of existing products in order to keep the
product line current and competitive.
lFundamentally new products: These projects
involve radically different product or production
technologies and may help to address new and
unfamiliar markets. Such projects inherently involve
more risk; however, the long-term success of the
enterprise may depend on what is learned through
these important projects.
The current key duplicating machine development
project comes under the category of Incremental
improvement to existing products. Table 1 shows the
mission statement for the key duplicating machine
development project. Mission Statement summarizes the
direction to be followed during the product development
and it helps in guiding as the development process
progresses.
Table 1. Mission Statement for key duplicating
machine project
TYPES OF KEYS
A survey and brief study was made to identify the
varieties of keys in key making market during this phase
itself. Following are the major varieties of keys available in
market, and that specially come for duplication purpose.
These keys can be divided into two broad categories, that
is
qDomestic keys
qAutomobile keys
Domestic keys
Table 2. Kind of problem and Percentage of
different types of keys(Domestic)
Table 2 shows which type of domestic keys cannot be
duplicated on the existing machine, and the reasons for
the same. It also shows the percentage of different types of
keys that come for duplication purpose at key maker shop.
The Table 3 helps in understanding which portion of the
keys that currently cannot be duplicated on the existing
machine should be given the most importance. It can be
observed that long keys is an area which has to be taken
care of, since these are the keys that come frequently at
key makers shop for duplication purpose and which
cannot be duplicated in the existing model of key
duplicating machine.
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Deshpande et al : Product Re-designing and Development of Key Duplicating...
Automobile keys
Table 3. Kind of problem and Percentage of
different types of keys (Automobile)
Table 3 shows which type of automobile keys cannot
be duplicated on the existing machine, and the reasons for
the same. It also shows the percentage for different types
of keys that come for duplication purpose at key maker
shop. From the Table 3 it can be observed that in case of
duplicating variety of automobile keys, the existing
machine is satisfying to a good extent.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT 1) IDENTIFYING
CUSTOMER NEEDS
This phase presents a method for comprehensively
identifying a set of customer needs. The goals of the
method are to:
lEnsure that the key duplicating machine is focused
on customer needs
lProvide a fact base for justifying the key duplicating
machine specifications
lCreate an archival record of the needs activity of
the development process
lEnsure that no critical customer need is missed or
forgotten
General steps that come under identifying customer
need activity are
lGathering the raw data from customers
lInterpreting the raw data in terms of customer
needs
lEstablishing the relative importance of the needs
Templates were prepared during identifying the
customer needs phase for key duplicating machine. The
template was filled in soon after the interaction with the
customer and edited. Many customers were interviewed
and templates were prepared.
A scale from 1 to 5 was used as shown below to
indicate importance of the feature, to give the importance
weighting to the needs collected from the key makers.
Scale from 1 to 5 indicating how important the feature is
1. Feature is undesirable, I would not consider a
product with this feature.
2. Feature is not important, but I would not mind having
it.
3. Feature would be nice to have, but is not necessary.
4. Feature is highly desirable, but I would consider a
product without it.
5. Feature is critical, I would not consider a product
without this feature
Table 4. Customer needs for the key duplicating
machine and their relative importance
Table 4 shows customer needs for the key duplicating
machine and their relative importance shown in a
convenient spreadsheet format.
II. ESTABLISHING TARGET SPECIFICATIONS
Customer needs are generally expressed in the
“language of the customer”. However, while such
expressions are helpful in developing a clear sense of the
issues of interest to customers, they provide little specific
guidance about how to design and engineer the key
duplicating machine. They simply leave too much margin
for subjective interpretation. For this reason,
specifications were established, which spell out in precise,
measurable detail what the key duplicating machine has to
do, what is to be attempted to achieve in order to satisfy
the customer needs.
The target specifications are established after the
customer needs have been identified but before product
concepts have been generated and the most promising
one selected. The process of establishing the target
specifications contains following steps,
lPreparation of list of metrics, using the needs-metrics
matrix, if necessary
54 International Journal on Design and Manufacturing Technologies, Vol.2, No.1, July 2008
lCollecting competitive benchmarking information
lSetting ideal and marginally acceptable target values
for each metric
The need that the key duplicating machine gives a
pleasing look may be quite critical to success in the
fashion-conscious key duplicating machine market, but
how can pleasing look be quantified? In these cases, the
need statement has to be simply repeated as a
specification and this metric will be subjective and was
evaluated by a panel of customers. Some metrics will not
lend themselves to numerical values. This is entered as
“List” in units column. In table 8 it can be observed that for
Metric No. 2 cutter, 'list' word is entered in units column.
The cutter is selected from the following list of cutters
available that is H.S.S (Straight teeth or Staggered teeth)
cutter, Solid Tungsten Carbide Cutter, Carbide Tipped
Cutter, Titanium Nitride Coated Cutter (Straight teeth or
Staggered teeth). Here Cutter refers to Metal Slitting
Saws.
Table 5. List of metrics for key duplicating machine
Table 5 shows the list of metrics for the key
duplicating machine. The relative importance of each
metric and the units for the metric are also shown.
Table 6 shows the Need-Metric Matrix representing
the relationship between the Needs and Metrics for key
duplicating machine project. The relationship of the new
product to competitive products is paramount in
determining commercial success. For the current project,
the competitive benchmarking is done by observing the
competitors product in use at customers site who are
using these machines, and also competitive
benchmarking information was got through mediums like
internet, industrial journals, magazines etc. A competitive
benchmarking chart was constructed with rows
corresponding to the customer needs and columns
corresponding to the competitive products
Table 6. The Need-Metric Matrix
The available information is synthesized in order to
actually set the target values for the metrics. Two types of
target values are useful, ideal value and a marginally
acceptable value. The ideal value is the best result that
could be hoped for. The marginally acceptable value is the
value of the metric that would just barely make the product
commercially viable. Bothof these targets are useful in
guiding the subsequent stages of concept generation and
concept selection, and for refining the specifications after
the product concept has been selected.
Table 7. Target specifications
Table 7 shows the marginal and ideal values for the
list of metrics of key duplicating machine, these values are
fixed before the concept generation stage and these may
be refined after a particular concept is finalized for key
duplicating machine.
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III. CONCEPT GENERATION
A product concept is an approximate description of
the technology, working principles, and form of the
product. The degree to which a product satisfies
customers and can be successfully commercialized
depends to a large measure on the quality of the
underlying concept. A concept is expressed as a sketch
and is accompanied by a brief textual description. In the
present case of key duplicating machine improvement 10
concepts were generated. To develop concepts for key
duplicating machine external and internal search were
conducted.
Charts containing description regarding each
concept, and the salient features of each concept were
also prepared, which guides in selecting the particular
concept for key duplicating machine development project.
Since it is an incremental improvement kind of project
different concepts in the form of different kinds of
mechanism to give feed are proposed.
IV. CONCEPT SELECTION
Concept selection is the process of evaluating
concepts with respect to customer needs and other
criteria, comparing the relative strengths and weakness of
the concepts, and selecting one or more concepts for
further investigation or development. Decision techniques
employed for selecting concepts range form intuitive
approaches to structured methods. One of such
structured approach is concept scoring method which is
used in present case of key duplicating machine.
Concept scoring uses a reference concept to
evaluate concept variants against selection criteria.
Concept scoring uses weighted selection criteria and a
finer rating scale. The selection criteria are listed along the
left hand side of the screening matrix as shown in Table 14.
These criteria were chosen based on the customer needs
that have been identified, as well as on the needs of the
enterprise. In the current case of key duplicating machine
improvement the existing model of the machine is taken as
the reference itself. In key duplicating machine project, 10
concepts were proposed, after discussions 3 concepts
were selected for evaluation.
Table 9 illustrates the scoring matrix used in this
stage. The concepts which have been identified for
analysis are entered on the top of the matrix. After the
criteria are entered, importance weights were added to the
matrix. To distinguish among competing concepts, a finer
scale was used as shown in Table 8.
Table 8. A finer scale
After entering the ratings, weighted scores were
calculated by multiplying the raw scores by the criteria
weights. The total score for each concept is the sum of the
weighted scores. Finally, each concept was given a rank
corresponding to its total score, as shown in Table 14.
Based on the selection matrix, it was decided which
concept or conceptsto select. Table14 shows the concept
scoring method applied to key duplicating machine. From
the table it can be observed that the Nut and Screw
Mechanism with Spring Arrangement is finally selected for
further development.Fig. 2 shows the line sketch of Nut
and Screw Mechanism with Spring Arrangement, which
was finalized in concept selection stage.
Table 9. The Concept Scoring Matrix
Fig. 2. Nut and Screw Mechanism with Spring Arrangement
56 International Journal on Design and Manufacturing Technologies, Vol.2, No.1, July 2008
V. CONCEPT TESTING
In concept testing basically the concepts were
communicated to the end users so that the responses
from the users, guide in further development for the
product. Concepts were tested to verify that the customer
needs have been met, and identifying any shortcomings,
which can be remedied during further development.
The concept, which was selected in concept
selection stage, that is nut and screw mechanism with
spring arrangement, was communicated to customers
(key makers) by means of verbal descriptions and line
sketches and their responses were fairly positive. But
since it is an iterative process 3D computer model of key
duplicating machine and its color pictures based on the
selected concept were shown after modeling procedure
was over.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
When the new product is an incremental
improvement on an existing product concept, then the
product architecture is defined within the product concept.
This is because, the basic technologies and working
principles of the product are predefined, and so
conceptual design efforts are generally focused on better
ways to embody the given concept. That's why the
system-level design and detailed design stages get
eliminated in the current case of key duplicating machine
improvement project. Since key duplicating machine
development is an incremental improvement kind of
project, most of the parts remain the same, which are
used, in existing model of key duplicating machine. To get
a basic idea about the dimensions of the parts that are
modified, revised, changed in the new model of key
duplicating machine brief design calculations were done.
The design data cannot be displayed due to the
confidential reasons. The components were analyzed on
3D CAD modeler.
The variable cutting speed is achieved by using a
variable speed DC motor. The motor is a normal single
speed permanent magnet motor, but variable speed is got
by attaching an electric drive unit to it. The speed is varied
by controlling the voltage to motor with the help of electric
drive unit. Though other options were available to get a
variable speed for example, stepped pulley and speed
change gearbox used as in lathe, the electrical step less
regulation of speed was chosen. The decision was guided
by the following reasons
mSafety and convenience for control while speed
changing
mFatigueless speed changing activity
mPossibility of carrying out key cutting operations at
optimum cutting speed. This not only increases
productivity, but also increases tool life.
mNoiseless and more smooth rotation and absence of
jerks which are characteristic of geared drive
Two parallel springs are used in the mechanism, to
guide the cutting action, while cutting automobile keys, so
that automobile keys can be cut at a single pass of
carriage, making automobile key cutting operation more
simple than earlier. This logic of spring force application
was captured during competitive benchmarking of the
product (silica key duplicating machine). The springs are
disengaged or locked using locking pins while cutting
domestic keys.
To enhance the key cutting capacity in terms of
variety, the concept of cutter position interchange thereby
changing the layout of keys was introduced, along with
linear dimensional changes between the two vices and
between the cutters and the respective copy dogs, so that
long keys can be accommodated.
Fig. 3 shows the picture of new model of key
duplicating machine modeled in SolidWorks CAD
package. It gives an idea, a view that how a key duplicating
machine looks like with newly applied concept.
Fig. 4 shows the picture of improved version of
existing model of key duplicating machine (model 2),
modeled in SolidWorks CAD package. It shows how the
machine looks like after making some incremental
changes.
Fig. 3. Re-designed and developed new model [Model 1]
Fig. 4. Improved version of existing key
duplicating machine [Model 2]
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Deshpande et al : Product Re-designing and Development of Key Duplicating...
mMore business to the key makers, as on the
improved version of the existing model of key
duplicating machine 90% of the keys can be cut,
compared to the existing model of key
duplicating machine on which 80% of keys can
be cut.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Authors express their sincere thanks to Mr.Deelip
Bhagwat, an expert entrepreneur from Belgaum for
suggesting the problem and helping all through.
REFERENCES
[1] Karl T. Ulrich And Steven D. Eppinger 'Product
Design And Development', Published By
Mcgraw-Hill Companies,1995
[2] A.K.Chitale. R.C.Gupta 'Product Design And
Manufacturing' Published By Prentice-Hall Of
India Pvt. Ltd., Second Edition,2002
[3] P.L.Ballaney 'Theory Of Machines' Khana
Publishers, Sixteenth Edition,1988
[4] Cmti 'Machine Tool Design Handbook' Tata
Mcgraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited,1982
[5] N.K.Mehta 'Machine Tool Design' Tata Mcgraw
Hill Publishing Company Limited,1995
[6] S.K.Hajra Choudhury, S.K.Bose,A.K.Hajra
Choudhury And Nirjhar Roy, 'Elements Of
Workshop Technology Vol Ii Machine Tools',
Media Promoters And Publishers Pvt. Ltd., First
Edition, 1964
[7] R.S.Khurmi And J.K.Gupta 'Machine Design'
Eurasia Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., Second
Edition,1980
[8] R.K.Jain 'Machine Design' Khanna Publishers,
Sixth Edition, 1991
[9] S.S.Bhavikatti 'Strength Of Materials', Vikas
Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., Second Edition,
1999
[10] ermann Jutz And Eduard Scharkus 'Westermann
Tables For The Metal Trade' Published By Wiley
Eastern Limited, Third Edition, 1984
[11] http://www.lvsales.com/lvskymch.htm
A suitable cutter cover of size 80 x 95mm is made to
avoid chips of metal from entering into eyes while key
cutting.
All the above solutions are applied to the existing
model of key duplicating machine
except the spring force application solution to get the new
improved version of the machine (model 2). Also other
changes like suitable color combination that is golden
yellow and white, and cover of drive are done for improved
model of key duplicating machine (model 2).
VII. CONCLUSION
Few of the challenging aspects covered in the
present work were as follows,
lUnderstanding and applying a structured product
development technique to key duplicating machine
which is helpful in developing any type of complex or
simple products effectively and efficiently.
lConducting the market survey and intervening the
customers (key makers) at the key duplicating
machine use site in a systematic step by step
process to create a high quality information channel
that runs directly between customers in target market
and the developers of the key duplicating machine to
best experience the use environment of the product,
the data recorded is helpful for future development of
the key duplicating machine.
lThe solutions got from the structured product
development process, were applied to the existing
model of key duplicating machine to get an improved
version of key duplicating machine (model 2) and
constructing its pre-production version and also a
new model (model 1) of key duplicating machine was
developed.
lAn improved version of existing model of key
duplicating machine, which provided the following
advantages to key makers
mSteel keys (steel with tensile strength of 82 kg/sq
mm) can be cut
mLong keys (up to 18cms) can be duplicated
mLong steel keys (steel with tensile strength of 82
kg/sq mm) can be duplicated in much lesser time
that is in 5 minutes compared to earlier which
would require 30 minutes using files, and which
was not possible to duplicate in existing model of
key duplicating machine
mImproved life of 'U' cutter (improved by 60%)
58 International Journal on Design and Manufacturing Technologies, Vol.2, No.1, July 2008
[12] http://www.keymart.com/key_machines.htm
[13] http://www.engineeringtalk.com/news/tce/
tce107.html
[14] http://www.jtsmach.com/jtswebshop/
asp/saws_index. asp
[15] http://www.thurstonmfg.com/pg_2.htm#plainmet
[16] http://www.solidworks.com/pages/
products/edu/soli dworksforstudents.html
[17] http://www.ulrich-eppinger.net
[18] http://web.mit.edu/2.744/www/courseinfor
mation/ classnotes.shtml
Dr.A. S. Deshpande is the Principal
of Fr. C. Rodrigues College of
Engineering, Bandra, Mumbai. A
post-graduate from IIT Kanpur, he
obtained his doctorate from NIT,
Suratkal in the area of CAD / CAM.
He has published 22 papers in
Journals and Conferences and his
experience in the field of academics and industry extends
over a period of 23 years.
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