It is an unfortunate theme on a regular basis that we are brought a prospective product development project by a client who is having problems moving forward with their design because of work done by inexperienced product design engineers. Almost weekly these fix-it or do-over projects come to us from boutique design and development firms typically located in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, LA Orange County, Seattle, Denver, New York City, and Atlanta.
These invent help and boutique firms often have impressive showrooms and expensive furnishings, and are often filled with fresh graduates from the nation's top universities, but without the experience to incorporate many important factors of manufacturability and proper design intent together, this can result in important aspects of a design being overlooked.
Many times, we see problems having to do with lack of design intent, such as improper or no forethought of potential manufacturability, low cost production, product reliability, or marketability. We can help assure that your product concept is designed with proper design intent and is able to be manufactured effectively and at a reasonable cost, the first time.
The root cause of this is described in one of our manufacturing articles titled Manufacturing Left The USA In 1983.
Many of these new or prospective clients we meet have spent thousands, and received what seems on the surface to be nice digital drawings of their concept, along with possibly a filed provisional patent application and some marketing materials such as sale sheets and dummy ads.
However, the problem often arises when these companies are asked to continue with the construction of prototypes, and or manufacturing cost, they may soon realize the work performed was just for the sake of producing renderings only, and of no value for the sake of manufacturing, as typically no CAD design files have been created, nor is there typically a way to construct a prototype, or obtain manufacturing cost, without the originating CAD files.
Often the wrong software at the inventor's outset of the new product development project is used. Unfortunately the thought of proceeding from digital rendering of concept, to prototyping, and or low cost manufacturing may have been overlooked. Typical wrong software used for manufacturing of products prospective clients bring us is, files created from Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk 3D Fusion, Blender, CREO, Rhino 3D, Sketchup, or some available freeware.
SolidWorks CAD is professional product development software, and in the last twenty years has been the standard for computer aided design and designing for manufacturing. With your concept created in SolidWorks, these files can be used for investor or licensing pitch decks, patent drawings, renderings, marketing and instruction guides, the actual design and engineering of your concept, stress analysis and load testing, producing static or functional prototypes (3D printed or conventional produced), and then taking these CAD files direct to any worldwide manufacturer for quotation, and production.
In addition to this, one of the main issues we see with projects that have been worked on by other product development companies has to deal with lack of design intent. With the experience and the ability and forethought to put all of these pieces together correctly, we are able to get your product to market quickly, efficiently, and on budget.
