Manufacturers are increasingly looking to find innovative and forward-thinking ideas to combat the challenge of remaining competitive whilst still reducing costs, maybe the biggest challenge they face today.
One-way OEMs are tackling this issue is by incorporating engineering services and valuable advice into the concept and design stages of their products, in an effort to stamp out possible issues at more advanced stages, or even worse during the production cycle. This expert support can significantly boost prototype time to market and create an altogether more fluid process.
Engineering Cost Out of Your Design Stage
When manufacturers bring in early specialist engineering involvement to their design process, the expertise of these engineers and services provided can help mitigate additional costs that may occur during the production of the product. Engineers can provide specialist support to ensure fluid plans are produced and that they are enabled to be successfully changeable at a later stage if required.
Through VAVE (value analysis, value engineering), costs can be engineered out of your builds by ensuring wherever possible that parts utilised are produced to international or industry specific standards. Through specialist engineering advice, costly non-standard parts can be eliminated from the design process, ensuring cost savings and reduced lead-times compared to those associated with the production of custom parts.
Reducing Prototype Time to Serial Production
Specialist engineering involvement can provide manufacturers with the opportunity to select parts from a readily available pool for use in their prototypes. This ensures that the parts selected for use in the prototype phase have been produced with the necessary quality certifications and prevents the requirement for the revalidation of parts when moving from prototype to serial production, thus eliminating the need to re-align the bill of materials as a result.
Car Factory: Female Automotive Engineer Wearing Hard Hat, Standing, Using Laptop. Monitoring, Control, Equipment Production. Automated Robot Arm Assembly Line Manufacturing Electric Vehicles.
Overall, receiving specialist advice and components from an engineer can shorten a manufacturers time to market, whilst preventing additional costs and delays in the prototypes production phase.
The Benefits of Part Rationalisation
In a rapidly changing world of technological advancements, manufacturers are utilising engineering services to support part rationalisation can support in the removal of part proliferation and gain value back through the economies of scale rationalisation can offer. Therefore, it’s clear that having earlier engineering involvement provides manufacturers with key design support, boosts prototype to production cycle times and prevents issues that may otherwise arise in the production process.
