Stuff 101 - 4 Steps To Engineering Process Development
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By :
Corey Rozon
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Engineering process development is essentially a four step process. To produce a commercial product you first need to have an idea, then you have to design the product, build the prototype and finally produce the product. Although there are many other steps including financing and marketing this article focuses on the development stage.
#1 - Coming up with your initial idea.
The beginning stages of idea generation is always the messy part of engineering process development. Coming up with the 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 percent 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.
#2 - Designing your product.
Once you have narrowed down you products ideas, the next stage of the engineering process 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. Once you have the go ahead from the developer you are ready to move on to the next step.
#3 - Developing the prototype.
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.
#4 - Moving on to production.
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.
By the end of the production stage financing and marketing will have already been in place. This may be something the product developer is in control of or something you have already set in place. Usually marketing and financing would happen in tandem with the development process, but as mentioned in the beginning this article focused directly on the four stages of the engineering process development.
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Author Resource:-
Corey Rozon is a freelance writer from Ottawa, Canada.
This article about the engineering process development cycle was written with the help of Convergent Intellectual Property.
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2010-02-09 01:46:46
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