When Development Doesn’t Translate to Manufacturing

Starting point

The customer had developed a device intended for use in the field of dental implants. The product had already gone through a development process and had reached the stage where it needed to move from development into actual manufacturing.

This was where the gap appeared. The previous development company had been responsible for developing the product, but not for its serial manufacturing. When the time came to take the design and turn it into a product that could be manufactured consistently by a production partner, the difficulties started to surface.

When the project reached us, the customer was not asking to reopen the development process. After what they had already been through, the expectation was much more basic: take the existing design and find a way to manufacture it.

Before manufacturing, we wanted to understand why the transfer had failed

Before moving forward with tooling and the manufacturing process, our development and engineering managers reviewed the product again.

The goal at this stage was not to redevelop the product, but to understand which elements of the design were making the transition to manufacturing difficult and what would be required to make the product manufacturable.

We reviewed the mechanical structure, part geometry, the way the parts connected, the number of parts required, the manufacturing and assembly sequence, and the relationship between the design and the way the product was intended to be produced.

During that review, it became clear that some of the difficulty was not in the manufacturing process itself. Part of it came from design decisions already built into the product.

We could have continued down the original path and focused most of the effort on adapting manufacturing to the product we had received.

As the review progressed, the team became increasingly convinced that this might be possible, but that it would not be the right solution for the customer.

The question changed: not only “How do we manufacture this?” but “Should it be manufactured this way?”

This was the turning point in the project.

Instead of trying only to solve the failure points in the existing design, we began to examine what changes to the product itself could make it better from an engineering, mechanical and manufacturing standpoint.

This was not a cosmetic change or a minor adjustment. In some areas, the structure had to be reconsidered, along with the way components connected and the way they would be manufactured and assembled.

The goal was not to make the product cheaper at the expense of the solution. The goal was to remove complexity that was not contributing to the product and to achieve the same function, and in some areas a better result, through a simpler and more appropriate structure.

Less material, fewer manufacturing steps and a better mechanical structure

As the design work progressed, it became clear that parts of the structure could be simplified significantly.

The new direction made it possible to reduce the size of the device, reduce the amount of raw material required and eliminate or shorten some manufacturing and assembly stages. At the same time, the new mechanical structure made it possible to achieve a stronger and more stable product.

For us, this was one of the important points in the project: simplification did not come at the cost of an engineering compromise. In this case, it was part of the improvement.

• The device was reduced in size compared with the original design.
• The product structure was simplified and made more suitable for manufacturing.
• The amount of raw material required was reduced.
• Some manufacturing and assembly steps were eliminated or shortened.
• The mechanical structure was improved, resulting in a stronger and more stable product.
• Reducing the complexity also lowered the expected manufacturing cost.

Development was not separated from manufacturing

One of the factors that influenced the outcome was the direct connection between the development team and the people responsible for tooling and manufacturing.

During the work, every design change was also examined from the production side: could the geometry be manufactured consistently, what would it mean for the mold, could assembly operations be reduced, would the change affect material consumption, and would the solution remain simpler once the project moved from prototype to serial production?

This allowed feedback from manufacturing to return to engineering while the design was still changing, rather than only after development had been completed.

For the customer, the result was far beyond what they expected

After the difficulties of the previous development process, the customer came to us with fairly low expectations: if we could find a way to manufacture the product already in hand, even if the manufacturing process remained complex and expensive, that would have been considered a success.

The possibility of stopping, going back to the design and coming out with a better product was not part of the original expectation.

When the new version was presented, the response was one of genuine surprise and excitement. The customer told us that they had simply hoped we could somehow manufacture the existing design; they had not expected the work to result in a device that was smaller, stronger, simpler to manufacture and less expensive to produce.

From their point of view, the result was far beyond what they had asked for when they first came to us.

Why we did not stop at what we were asked to do

From a purely commercial standpoint, it would have been possible, and in some ways commercially sensible, to choose a different path.

But once we identified that the product could be improved materially before moving into manufacturing, we did not think it was right to ignore it.

For us, responsibility in a project like this does not end with questions of profitability or whether we are technically capable of manufacturing what we received. If the design itself makes manufacturing difficult, increases cost or leaves the customer with an inferior product, that needs to be raised.

In this case, taking one step back in development allowed the project to move several steps forward as a product.

The lesson from the project: the move from development to manufacturing is an engineering stage in its own right

A product can work as a prototype and still be a problematic product for serial manufacturing.

Decisions that affect cost, strength, part count, assembly and manufacturing stability are often made long before the product reaches a production machine.

When development and manufacturing are managed separately, some of these issues only become visible after the design has already been frozen. When development engineers, toolmakers and manufacturing teams work together, those issues can sometimes be solved while they are still engineering decisions rather than production problems.

For us, that was the central story of this project. The customer came to us so that we could manufacture the product.

In the end, the first task was to understand which product was actually the right one to manufacture.