The Cost of Design Changes in High-Volume Manufacturing | Simplexity Product Development

Read more at bit.ly/2kykqT6. Dorota Shortell, CEO at Simplexity, describes the exponential relationship between design changes and the cost of your design; about 75 percent of the cost of the product is dictated by the initial design and the architecture that's chosen.
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Some companies come to us and they have a prototype already developed and they say, “hey can you guys just look at this prototype, work out any bugs, and release it for high-volume manufacturing.”
Now while that sounds great and sounds really easy, most times when that happens that prototype really isn’t designed and ready for high-volume manufacturing.
And companies often wonder “well why not, we have one that works, why can’t we just make a hundred thousand of them?”
And really the key is in understanding design and the design process, is that there’s things that you have to bake from the very start, you have to bake those in and you have to understand how to design a product, how to design a part for the right manufacturing processes that will be used at the end, and you have to do that right at the beginning.
So not only do you have to think about, is the part going to be machined or molded, you have to think about how it is going to be assembled, how is it going to be tested?
Those disciplines together designed for manufacturing, designed for assembly, designed for test, are now known as ‘DFX’.
And looking at DFX is a big component of having a successful product that’s going to be able to scale for high-volume manufacturing.
One of the other things that’s also important is the components that are actually in that design and in that prototype.
So if someone selects a sensor that costs ten dollars, it’s an industrial sensor, not realizing that the cellphone industry for example, has the exact same functionality, maybe not quite the industrial specifications, and it only costs fifty cents, you have to start over and do some work again ultimately saving money at the end.
So when should you start considering design for high-volume manufacturing?
Right now, if you haven’t started it start right now no matter where you are in the design process.
The longer you wait the more it’s going to cost.
There’s an exponential relationship.
Design changes upfront don’t cost that much, but once you start tooling and manufacturing, each design change starts costing you more and more and more.
About 75% of the cost of a product is dictated by the initial design and the architecture that’s chosen.
To find out more about design for high-volume manufacturing, please visit simplexitypd.com
Simplexity provides engineering design services across a range of industries. Our "simpler is better" engineering approach reduces costs while improving the lifecycle of your product, saving you money in development, manufacturing and product sustainability. We understand the most important challenges which is why we have mastered cost reduction while maintaining the most innovative industrial, consumer, and biotech engineering solutions.