I had an interesting discussion a few days ago. It made me realize most people see products of obviously poor quality and think the issues come from manufacturing, while, in fact, they most often come from bad product design! Let's see why here... … [Read more...]
How A DFQ Review Designs Quality INTO Your Product At An Early Stage [Podcast]
What if you could reduce the chances of quality problems long before your product goes into production? A DFQ review can help you achieve this! What is DFQ? Design For Quality is where we review a number of factors that affect quality at the early stages of the new product introduction process, so that's your concept and prototypes. Not every Chinese manufacturer will do this, and while it may be tempting to power through to production to get to market, it's risky to do so (could your … [Read more...]
Prototesting: Reap All the Value of Proof of Concept Prototypes
Many of our clients design their own products. And we typically don't get involved in the initial concept/ideation phase. That's clearly not our competence, nor our offer. However, we are often invited to ask questions about their new product idea, to test if their concept is manufacturable, to confirm it won't be extremely hard to develop, etc. And we see the same patterns, over and over. Many people don't talk a lot to potential users/customers when planning for the features. They don't … [Read more...]
Investigating the Causes of Product Failure and Improving Design
You conduct reliability tests on your new products. You and your suppliers do product inspections and laboratory tests on mass production orders. Your customers probably give you feedback on the issues they find on what you ship to them. You collect many data this way. You set aside samples that don't pass. But do you learn from this? One of the most important activities is the investigation of the causes of product failure when certain samples fail the inspections/tests or fail in the hands of … [Read more...]