QualityInspection.org

Quality Assurance, Product Development, and Purchasing Strategies in China

How the right to repair movement & laws may affect manufacturers in future [Podcast]

In this episode... Sofeast's CEO Renaud Anjoran talks about the 'Right To Repair' movement that is gathering pace today. Consumers are calling for it and governments are starting to bring in legislation in order to steer the electronics industry in a more sustainable direction and reduce the huge amount of e-waste being created each year. But if you're manufacturing electronic products, how might it affect you? Having to design for repairability certainly adds new challenges, but … [Read more...]

Manufacture in China, Get Your Product Copied? Not That Simple.

There are many examples out there of companies that got in big trouble because of their suppliers in China. In many cases, a supplier got very tempted to start selling the same product on their customer’s market.  As a result, people who are designing and developing a new product are often reluctant to plan for manufacturing in China, even when the difference in cost will obviously be massive. … [Read more...]

Navigating The Product Design and NPI Maze For New Products [Podcast]

In this episode… You've got an idea for a unique new product! Amazing! Now you need to develop that product concept, design it, test and validate it, and much more before finally going into mass production and bringing it to market. You may think that this is a linear process, but in fact, it's more like a complex maze and you may take many twists and turns. Renaud Anjoran is joined by experienced British product designer Andy Bartlett to explore this NPI process and the best practices … [Read more...]

How Bad Product Design Leads to Many Quality Issues

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 good DFM and DFA Help with Production Cost & Quality

I have been reading 'the' reference textbook on the concepts of DFM and DFA (design for manufacturing and design for assembly). It's great for design engineers (especially on the mechanical side), for NPI program managers, and for anybody working on reliability, quality, or costing at the product design stage. People involved in manufacturing would also benefit from skimming through it. I picked 2 graphs that are quite interesting. … [Read more...]

The Design for X Approach: 12 Common Examples

The Design For X (or “Design for Excellence”) methodology lays out a number of design guidelines for reaching the product’s objectives. The idea is to review and improve the product & process design before the new product is manufactured. Many product designers design for functionality and for aesthetics. Of course, those are important, but there are other important questions such as “can it be made with mature processes?” and “can it be made within budget?” (a.k.a. Design for … [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...]

Design New Products with ‘Right To Repair’ in Mind

There is a long-term trend that companies and people designing new products need to have in mind: A growing share of consumers expect brands to design more sustainable (or fewer unsustainable) products; In some regions of the World, regulators are also pushing companies in that direction.   EU legislation driving changes to consumer products The latest sign comes from the EU. This new legislation is going to require consumer technology to last for a decade. The European … [Read more...]

A Textbook on Design for Manufacturing and the NPI Process (EVT-DVT-PVT)

I am halfway through this book and I thought many readers would enjoy it: Product Realization: Going from One to a Million by Anna C. Thornton. Here is the book's presentation by its publisher: Product Realization: Going from One to a Million delivers a comprehensive treatment of the entire product launch process from beginning to end. Drawing upon the author's extensive first-hand experience with dozens of successful product launches, the book explores the process of bringing a design from … [Read more...]

Good Project Management With Chinese Suppliers From A Product Designer’s Perspective [Podcast]

Let's hear from an experienced product designer about project management with Chinese suppliers... In this episode, we catch up with Andy Bartlett, a friend of Sofeast, who is an enormously experienced product designer from the UK, to discuss his project management best practices and observations from his 'designer's' perspective for when developing a new product and manufacturing it in China. If you're developing a new product and have Chinese suppliers, you'll love this episode. Andy … [Read more...]