Product Design for Manufacturing
Product design, a fun but never easy task. There are so many things to miss the mark on. Does my product stand out? Does it offer too few or too many features? Does it offer the right features? Can I manufacture this product at a profitable price point?
The Michael on Product Management and Marketing blog has a good article on 5 Tips for Kick-Butt Design. Although his blog is primarily focused on high tech and software products, many of the central tenets are the same for hard consumer products. He recommends:
- Start with User Interface
- Work with user Interface Designers
- Pay Attention to Details
- Simpler is Better
- Be Brave
To add to the difficulty in successfully accomplishing these five items (Michael notes the ease with which these are understood and the disturbing regularity of general neglect for them), it's a good idea to begin pondering how all of these things will play out in a manufacturing sense, or design for manufacturing. For whatever reason, the realities of manufacturing are often brought in late to the equation and can force a product development team to go back and start again, force undesirable tradeoff decisions, or in a worst case scenario, scrap their efforts.
A product development group recently came to us to get some preliminary costing for a large toy product they were working on. Thankfully, I don't think they had gotten too far down the path when they began to explore the cost issues. We didn't have much information to go on, but the pricing that came back from overseas vendors was way out of the ballpark in regards to their targets. We've got some tricks up our sleeves to get the costs down. Looking at alternative fabrication processes, alternative materials, feature tradeoffs, and good ol' negotiation tactics are all worth exploring. It's going to be tough, but they're not out of the game yet.
The point is, those 5 tips in product development are all great goals, just don't forget you have to be able to make the thing at a reasonable cost. And if you can't, explore what changes you might be able to make to produce it at a reasonable cost. And if can't do that, better to find out earlier rather than later.
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