I’m running out the door but I wanted to toss this up to the readership, as I feel you are uniquely qualified to add to it.
Someone posted the following question on Quora: What is the process for developing and readying a product for manufacturing?
I jumped on it, and answered. I’ve copied my answer below; I know I’ve glossed over (or outright missed) some things, and would love to turn this into a conversation.
This response ended up being longer than I thought it would. Still, I feel as though there are some things left out. Keep the following in mind as you are reading.
- You can always pay for more concepts or more levels of refinement.
- Technical problems can push you back a step. For example, if the technology doubles in size, the industrial design concept may want to be changed.
- The person commissioning the development creates a Product Requirements Document (PRD). This is a description of what you want your product to be, and should include feedback from marketing, sales, users, everyone. Even with all the preliminary work that goes into it, it will still will probably need to be fleshed out in more detail with the development team, but you should be able to come up with a good starting point on your own. Furthermore, this will be a living, breathing document.
- Is the technology a known entity? If yes, skip to the next step. If no, you will want to have domain experts (in Electrical Engineering Mechanical Engineering,Computer Science, etc.) reduce/develop the technology to a point where it can be commercialized. This can be a significant step for high-tech products.
- From here, Industrial Designers will take the PRD, the technical limitations of the technology, and (if they are good) usability considerations (many designers will pay lip service to usability, the bad ones just fake it), and coalesce them into some rough “blue sky” concepts, with a little bit of technical input from Mechanical Engineers and other experts. If you are hiring an industrial designer, the number of concepts to be delivered is usually agreed upon in the contract.Also, depending on the nature of the product, rough foam models might be mocked up to aid in the evaluation of ergonomic considerations.
- At this point, the concepts are shown to the client. The client can choose to take these to customers, but often chooses to review them with resources internal to their company, or with a select few Subject Matter Experst (SME), Key Opinion Leaders (KOL), or some other Marketing term for ‘important people’.
- Based on initial feedback, the client down selects from the rough concepts; usually to 2 or 3. It is at this point also where the client will notice specific details they had not considered before and express a preference. This often manifests itself in a “take the knobs on concept foam coreA and the widgets from concept B and roll them into concept C” sort of conversation
- The concepts that have made the cut are refined further. This next round of concepts often has cleaner drawing, more consideration payed to manufacturing cost, assembly, technical feasibility, reliability, and other engineering considerations. The designers may also create some 3D models to better communicate the geometry to the client. They may also create 3D models sufficient to be prototyped as appearance models. These appearance models can be used to show to users for feedback.
- The concepts are presented to the client (who may or may not show it to users) who downselects to one concept. Alternatively, the client can discuss taking elements from one design and adding them to the other design. This would be discussed with the designers and engineers and evaluated for technical, ergonomic, and aesthetic efficacy. If it seems appropriate (and has been agreed to in the contract, or the client is willing to pay for the additional work), the designers and engineers will go back and refine the concept until all stakeholders are satisfied.
- Usually it helps for the designers to create a 3D underlay to give the engineers a starting point, so the designers may do that.
- From here the engineers begin to take over. CAD geometry is created (either off of 2D or 3D underlays from the designers) with considerations for manufacturing, shock and vibration, component placement RF shielding, weight, chemical resistance, ingress protection, fatigue, and other requirements.
- As the CAD geometry is created, frequent prototyping is critical. As soon as a scheme is developed to accommodate the requirements alluded to in step 9, it should be physically prototyped. This can be expensive, but neglecting to truly solve high level problems results in expensive detail work being done on a shaky foundation, with all the risk that such an approach entails (lots of it!)
- From here it is just prototype and iterate until the requirements are achieved. This is the time frame where tradeoffs are often made. Aesthetic, usability, cost, schedule, and other considerations are all vying for attention, and sometimes the choices are mutually exclusive. This is a point where the PRD is worth it’s weight in gold. A clear understanding by all parties (from engineer to CEO) of what this product wants to be is necessary for clean execution of development. Changes to the PRD at this point can be expensive (both in money and time). It is up to the client to determine whether a (to make a number) 5% drop in quality or increase in material costs is preferred over a 1 month delay in release date. This estimation may yield different results for products with a short sales cycle (consumer electronics) than those with a longer sales cycle (capital equipment)
- Once the design meets all requirements, PROTOTYPE ONE MORE TIME!!!!!! Even if it feels like you’ve just prototyped a week or two ago, nothing will make you sleep better at night than knowing that the exact design you are investing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in is the exact one that you have prototyped and therefore have the utmost confidence in.
- (Thanks to Greg Aper for asking me to elaborate on this)…As the development process winds down, drawings will begin to be created. The level of detail of these drawings can vary (and of course is specified in the contract), but will usually contain the critical dimensions to be used for inspection, along with the tolerance of allowable variation of those dimensions. Material specifications, assembly instructions, and all other directions will be on this documentation. There should be much back and forth between the engineers and the manufacturer (and the client to, depending on the level on involvement) so that no one is surprised by what is on the drawings
- Once everything is designed and the documentation is completed, it’s time to release it for production. Get the circuit boards made, have the tools made to create the metal and plastic parts, get the OTS part on order, etc. The documentation mentioned in step 13 will dictate how the part is to be manufactured; this includes the 3D CAD (usually an IGES, STEP or other dumb export) as well as the written instructions.
- (Another Greg Aper recommendation)…Once the tools are created it’s time to inspect the parts that come off the tools. This is called an FOT (First of the Tool) inspection. During this inspection the engineer will check the parts against the drawing to ensure that dimensions are in the acceptable range, aesthetic considerations have been met, and so on. In the case of tolerances, statistical analysis can be used to extrapolate how many ‘failures’ per million will occur. If this number is unacceptable, the tool may be modified appropriately. There are other nuances as well, and they vary with the choice of manufacturing process used; suffice it to say that the people who designed the device should be involved throughout manufacturing to ensure the integrity of the design is maintained.
- Once all the parts are produced, they will need to be assembled and shipped. Some places will manufacture all the parts (sheetmetal, plastic, ceramimc, electonics) and do all the assembly. This is rare. More likely you will have different parts made at different places. It is up to the client to determine what they want to pay for. You can pay to have all your subassemblies and parts combined into a final product, or you can have the subassemblies sent to you where you can finish off the final product. This is often the case in high tech products, where the low-tech components are created elsewhere and the high-value element of the design is created in-house or at a trusted supplier.
From there, sell it.
That’s it. Get loud in the comments.
Related posts:
- Thoreau on perfect product design
- flow in product design (with music to get you there)
- free body diagrams in product design
Article by chris loughnane
Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 134 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.
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