How Many Prototype Iterations And Safety & Reliability Tests Do We Need For Our New Product?

Customers often ask us these questions when they’re developing a new product to bring to market:

How many prototype iterations will be needed?
What are the essential tests for ensuring product safety and compliance?

It’s quite hard to answer this simply, because every project is different. However, here, we’ll explain what affects the number of prototypes you will need to create during the development process, and which tests you might require to validate your product’s safety and compliance depending on how regulated the product category is. Importers can use this information to get an early read on what you need to do and budget for in your project.

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1. Exploring Prototyping and Testing.

Products take a lot of different forms. If your product is a fairly simple cuboid then maybe you only need one 3D-printed prototype iteration, whereas a new space launch rocket will, by necessity, go through a lot of testing and need many iterations! More complex products will almost certainly need more prototypes to be made and require advanced software to simulate them (especially for the likes of aerospace products where physical prototypes can’t be made and possibly destroyed in large quantities due to their cost and scale). (00:40)

Considerations for Product Development.

Product development for innovative new products isn’t a straightforward path, and as you create and test more prototypes you will find technical challenges and problems that need to be worked out. For example, many things could lead to you making more prototypes:

Users may see an early prototype and provide feedback, leading you to change the design.
A key component like a display or battery turns out to have specific requirements and this leads you to need to adjust the product size.
You have been too ambitious and need to reduce the complexity of the product by dropping features (often done to save on development costs, reduce development time, etc)

Businesses often ask about prototype iterations because this has financial implications and affects their timelines. These probably shouldn’t be their top concerns around prototyping, but it is common. It may be tempting to select the supplier who promises you that they’ll be done after a couple of iterations, but if they are being over-optimistic or just trying to get a quick payday, it could land you in hot water as risks of a bad outcome are increased. (05:59)

Factors Influencing Number of Iterations.

If you demand a similar standard of product to Apple, but you do not specify how it should be similar you can expect the manufacturer to have to make more prototype iterations as you may keep rejecting those that they make for different reasons such as little details being off here and there. If you keep pushing in this way, a manufacturer may drop the project as it just becomes unsustainable for them.

Rather than focusing on the exact number of iterations required, it is better to think about the number of months required for the project. Depending on the level of uncertainty, your supplier may give you a timescale of 6, 12, or even 18 months for the development process. They should also be able to give a rough budget based on the man-hours required if they do certain things and not others or include everything. So this would be stepped costs based on whether the prototypes include all features, or fewer, for instance. (15:36)

Preparing for Working with Manufacturers.

You need to give your manufacturer a firm idea of what success looks like to you, documenting and describing how it must look, the environment it must survive in, or how many years it must operate without any issues. Before you go to the manufacturer you should work with an industrial designer to create mature product designs including aesthetics, buttons, touch and feel, materials, colors, location of charging ports, etc. Getting a product design engineer to examine the concept and give you advice on what technical trade-offs, materials, etc, are relevant is also a must as their experienced advice can help you design a product less likely to have problems down the line during development as they will know what will and won’t work well for it and can give you options. This helps you firm up your concept to give to the industrial designer who will already have a good idea of what a feasible product looks like thanks to your preparatory work. (17:48)

Importance of Documentation and Clarity.

If one single company does everything in-house, which is unlikely, then miscommunication and things being missed are less likely as all teams are together, but many businesses work with global teams. It would not be unusual for a business to be in Illinois, with a mechanical team in Texas, a firmware developer in India, and hardware manufacturing in China. In cases like this, documenting everything becomes critical and provides these benefits:

It gives all teams clarity over the project and helps them move in the right direction
It makes teams accountable for delivering the tasks assigned to them on time

If the project has been documented it will be easier to take the existing information, check it, and make adjustments to quickly action changes. Instead of a long discussion, colleagues can read the documents and see what has already been changed, and they are in a better position to think through all the implications of the changes. (22:58)

2. Ensuring Safety and Compliance.

People often ask which and how many tests will be required to ensure a product is safe and compliant, but it is not one-size-fits-all as it depends on the product, its market, and all kinds of factors. Another key factor is how complex the product is, and if it’s in a particularly strictly regulated industry (such as medical devices, automotive, toys, etc).

For simpler products, before doing any testing, consider what might go wrong and be a safety hazard by doing a risk analysis on the product design. You will consider the safety standards of the market at the same time as these influence your design. Where reliability is concerned you can follow a ‘Design For Reliability’ approach, considering things like redundancies to boost reliability. Next would be design reviews from engineers that may give you some ideas about how the product might fail or be unsafe that you haven’t thought of. This may lead to design tweaks which eliminate possible hazards and improve the product’s reliability and safety without even doing any testing yet. Verifying and validating the product is also a good step here, so for a smartwatch, for example, you may compare its performance to that of real medical diagnostic equipment … does it return the correct data and so can be seen to be functioning correctly?

Consider all of the ways a product can be affected when in use, and devise a test plan to replicate these scenarios, environments, and failure modes, as testing like this is part of verification and validation. For safety and reliability, you will typically prepare a test plan that is customized to your product rather than picking a standard ‘off the shelf.’ (26:53)

Awareness of Industry Regulations.

For more strictly regulated industries where safety is critical a stronger approach to safety and reliability is needed, and there are management system standards like ISO 13485 for medical devices, AS9100 for aerospace, or IATF 16949 for automotive, and so on, that tell you what framework to follow when designing, developing, and testing, and transferring your new product to manufacturing.

The country/ies you sell into will also have their regulations which you will need to comply with or you may face stiff penalties if caught not complying. Luckily if you follow the certification schemes and local regulations it will help lead you in the right direction and avoid including banned substances etc. in the product. (37:46)

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