Better Be Running! Tools to Drive Design Success (part 1)

This is the first in a series of excerpts from “Better Be Running! Tools to Drive Design Success” by Dr. Ronald Hollis, President, CEO, and Co-founder of Quickparts.com (Atlanta, GA). Written for business managers, the book focuses on manufacturing processes, tooling choices, and production strategies that can help companies bring products to market faster. To order the book, go to www.betterberunning.com.

The Business of Product Development Technologies

Product development is the oxygen of business. Free enterprise nurtures the creativity behind product development and unleashes powerful, positive changes in the world. In the last 25 years, product development has “gone global” and continues to race after an ever-widening horizon, be it the far field of innovation or the geopolitical turf of Southeast Asia. Product development flourishes in an environment of freedom. The future looks bright in countries where businesses thrive as the primary elements of free enterprise, like China’s recent firestorm of economic expansion. Manufactured parts are the common denominator to both free and un-free societies. The almighty part is the sole reason the U.S. now connects to the previously inaccessible society of China.

If you study the incredible “power of the part,” you can see how it feeds into an ever-expanding spiral of interconnection. Follow the movement of each element within manufacturing and discover the ripple effect set in motion by the part. Parts generate revenue to sustain business, business sustains employees, employees sustain communities, communities sustain governments, and governments sustain other governments that, we hope, sustain a peaceful world in which we are all interdependent.

A potent driver of society, product development businesses in a laissez-faire economy are required to develop products to grow more commerce. The most dynamic product development teams require dreamers, doers, innovators, and leaders who continually add to their knowledge base, as the most far-reaching knowledge drives the greatest innovation. The latest business mantra “faster, better, cheaper” is an unrelenting standard to which we all answer. It impacts the way we imagine a new product, the way we conceive a well-designed assembly, and the way we verify, test, and produce tools and parts to make the final assembled part at the greatest quality and the least cost.

Design on Monday, Manufacture on Wednesday

“Dream it, Do it!” Today’s product development cycle is almost that fast, thanks to an abundance of new product development tools. You can design a product in Atlanta on Monday, get your investor’s blessing in New York on Tuesday, and manufacture it on Wednesday, -- an almost unthinkably fast creation story. When the product developer of the twenty-first century realizes that the world really is his her or toolbox and understands how to apply these new tools, nothing can stop their glorious success. Isn’t this a strong enough motivator to learn a new manufacturing paradigm?

Some 30 years ago, American product design became complacent, appearing lackluster in innovation. The illusion of product development prowess in the U.S. was still strong. In reality, it was a time of exploding Pintos, heavy telephones, and clunky televisions. Fat, dumb, and happy, design companies were sleepwalking, and product developers seemed to be resting on collective laurels of the U.S. as a “success culture” of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In the ‘70s, global competition reared its head for the first time. Fortunately for the U.S., Japan decided to intervene and take over the U.S. market for everything. The old corporate geezers in the U.S. did not want the world to change until they retired. These long-timers shifted the problem to the next generation, letting Japan’s elegant know-how be someone else’s problem.

As it turned out, the Japanese invasion of the U.S. market shook things up and released a new wave of innovation and corporate development in the ‘80s. Out of obvious necessity to compete globally for the first time, the next generation of Americans germinated many innovations, including computer-aided design (CAD) software and sophisticated technologies that convert the output of the CAD software to real parts using additive fabrication (AF). Additive fabrication was called rapid prototyping (RP) in the beginning and is still a common term used.

In the ‘90s, innovation was revealed through more sophisticated 3D software and newly released AF machines. The turn of the century gave the mass market access to that innovation, now at the point of fully evolving into new realities of layered manufacturing and low-volume production.