Can manufacturing and product development work together?

YES ... it can be and it is being carried out through 'suggestion scheme', 'quality circle'

and regular follow up with trial run and implementation.

"Change alone permenant" This is the best quote suitable for any kind of development process.

More frequent changes are common during product development process. These of the changes due to marketing input, management decision, technical non fesibility in terms of Tooling, part manufacturing & Assy.This is a main challenge in this process.

communication will play major role in case. we can easlily over come this issue, if we keep proper change track record & well accessable data management during the life cycle of Product development,

First We have to form the cross functional team with all dept. repersentative who influnce the product devlopment process, define the clear roles & responsibilities of each member of team, create proper communication flow chart between each process. If any information comunicated in proper way will avoid conflict.

Product Design & Development will contribute more than 90% of the End Product Quality & Cost.

During time the product development team should work with manufacturing engineers to finalize the parts manufacturing process with optimal target cost.

It will helpfull to make '0' defect produt to market, reduce lead time for rework the tools & Die, cost of rework in product assembly line , service cost and Improve the Brand image for High quality product at low cost. 

Product & Process Benchmarking will also help a lot in this process. In the competation in present maket situation in the world every manufactures should release new product with low cost with less lead time.

It is possible If we involve manufacturing engineers from the early stage of product development process to settle with proven Low cost MFG process during part design stage. Otherwise Development team will face Big messup with MFG during Release of documents for part manufacturing.Both should work together like family.

Though product development and manufacturing are distinct, collaboration between these two in early phases helps come up with a solid product and faster time to market.

Nowadays, the product design is regarded more as a verb than a noun ( as book definitions suggest ). As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component by people ( referred to as Designers ) with intention to serve people ( end users ) .

In its new avatar as now most commonly phrased as “ New Product Development (NPD)”  is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product or service to market. Now a days, within the overall ambit of product life cycle management (PLCM) companies typically see new product development as the first stage in generating and commercializing new products. This is used to maintain or continually grow their market share.

There are two parallel paths involved in the NPD process: one involves the idea generation, product design, and detail engineering; the other involves market research and market analysis. The Idea of “Tata Nano” evolved by positioning it as a “People’s car” after extensive market research for capturing needs and identification of the market segment which was served as design input to the product designers of the company , who simultaneously passed thru concept development to Detailed Design by capturing changing needs dynamically thru back and forth reviews with the marketers , developers, Purchasers , Suppliers in the project team( also sometimes referred to as "Cross Functional Team-CFT" or "Multidisciplinary Team-MDT" ) to launch a final product. The process commonly known as “ Concurrent Engineering”  involved rigorous design practices and design tools while passing thru various stages of its Design and Development with in shortest possible time. 

Yes.

That's the reason why APQP model is used in automotive field.

That's also the activity so called DFx is used in so many field.

With appropiate feed back and development, there will be able to robust conceptual design with robust manufacturingability. Although the cross functional team will be such big that can cause a lot of communication and information back and forth, however, it's worth to do so.

Yes,Both must be there.If one is not present other will not exists

yes

During early times of industrialistion what was being manufactured was sold. Like the MODEL T's. Mr ford was happy to sell all the colours till the time they were all BLACK. But this has undergone a shift. What is required by the cusotmers need to be manufactured. THe qualititative inputs are taken thru research which are quantified & acordingly manufacturing planned. manufacturing needs to compliment Product development .

    Yes, the concept of making manufacturing and product engineering to work in parallel is good. This will help in reducing the overall product development time and increase in productivity. The only thing to be done is that the manufacturing engineers should have a early access to design information before manufacturing a product.