If you are looking to market a new product or have a great idea for a commercial product then this article may help you through the engineering product development stage. Engineering product development can be explained in four steps, from idea generation to product design to building your first prototype and finally sending the product to production. It can be a long road, and there are other factors involved, including getting start-up money and marketing the product, but this article will deal solely with the engineering side of things.
Step 1
The beginning stages of idea generation are always the messy part of engineering product development. Coming up with an idea is essentially the easiest part. It will definitely not be the most expensive part of product development but it will take up to 50% or more of the whole development time. Sometimes referred to as the Fuzzy Front End, idea generation is rife with brainstorming notes, hand sketches of the product, simple models, and if you are savvy enough some preliminary CAD sketches. At the end of the idea generation stage you review all of your ideas and evaluate them based on which ideas you think are doable.
Step 2
Once you have narrowed down you products ideas, the next stage of the engineering product development cycle is the product design. In this highly competitive commercial industry the initial industrial design of a product may be the only thing that will make it stand out for the potential developer. At this point an industrial designer is going to be your best friend. They can take your idea and give it life, which will often result in a full-size, 3D mock-up, a CAD rendering, and an industrial design control drawing.
Step 3
By this step you have successfully wowed the developer and have decided on the product you are going to produce, so now it is time to make a functional prototype. Prototype development is all about precision and accuracy. The implementation of an advanced 3D CAD system is required and no matter how good the drawings are there will still be some mistakes made. Don't be surprised if you have to make more than one prototype to get all the bugs out.
Step 4
Now that you have a successfully working prototype it is time to move on to production. It can take up to 20 weeks for the tooling to be complete to build your product, but if you have worked out all, or most, of the bugs with the prototype you should be okay. Getting the help of skilled model makers to create the master models of all your parts will help decrease the time it takes before production can begin too.
Now that you have the product in production it is time to market it. By this time you have already completed your market research and know who your target market is. If you have made a deal with a developer likely they will take over all the marketing aspects of your product and you won't have anything to worry about.
Author Resource:-
Corey Rozon is a freelance business writer in Ottawa.
This article about the engineering process development cycle was written on behalf of Convergent Intellectual Property, a Canadian company specializing in intellectual property rights.
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