By: LA New Product Development Team based in Shreveport, Louisiana.
What to Expect Without Proper Planning
A majority of the time, as is shown through rushed work or procrastination, when you don’t plan throughout your stages you are bound to make a mistake somewhere along the line. If you don’t properly focus on either the planning, designing, or production stage you will most likely hit a few obstacles and your product development cost can skyrocket. In order to prevent this and counteract the additional costs of manufacturing, there are a few tips to follow:
- Don’t Rush Through Planning
As already mentioned before, you need to plan properly. Many find it tempting to rush through this stage because of how insignificant it seems compared to designing the actual item. However, if you don’t take your time to properly oversee the initial production of your new design, there may be unexpected consequences that you have no solution for.
- Reuse Ideas From Old Designs
By recycling old ideas from previous designs and product concepts, you will be able to come up with innovative items to manufacture rather than starting with new parts that will cost money to design. You can change the purpose of these parts to benefit you in the production of your item.
- Reduce Prototypes
By using prototypes, you are able to test the design and solutions you have set up for your products. However, if you continue testing out your product and continue producing prototypes to fix each minor issue, it becomes rather expensive. There are simulations that you could create to test out each design rather than spending your money on creating it physically. It also benefits you to use simulations in order to optimize your item’s design. These computer tools can significantly reduce your product development cost.
- Collaborate
When you collaborate with other product developers or engineers, whether through file sharing or hands-on experimenting, the completion process is much easier. It reduces the number of mistakes because there are multiple engineers working on it, so they may catch errors that you didn’t and further reduce the cost.
- Meet 6-Sigma Manufacturing Standards
To meet the standards for 6-Sigma Manufacturing, you must have less than 3.4 defects per million production opportunities. The system for this program encourages that you carefully define, measure, analyze, improve, and control your designed products before presenting and selling them. To cut back on the chance of defects, use the best quality manufacturing devices to create your product. Cut back on human error in manufacturing by using techniques like precision stamping, die casting, or other automated strategies.