Product Design & Development

The success of any new product relies on effective selection of all components, materials, and suppliers. ESCATEC has Design for Procurement (DfP) expertise across electrical, electronic, mechanical, and electro-mechanical disciplines. And with highly experienced purchasing and engineering groups within Malaysia, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and the UK with access to a global network of suppliers, we are ideally placed to advise and support customers at the critical design stage.

Getting this right will have an important impact on the products viability throughout its lifecycle and provide significant benefits downstream, including:

• Reduced time-to-market
• Lower material lead-time
• Minimised material liability
• Consolidated suppliers
• Extended product lifecycle

Design for Manufacture (DFM), sometimes called Design for Manufacturability, is the element of the design effort that focusses on producibility to enable the product to be assembled in the most cost-effective manner, in a shorter time frame, with superior quality.

As most of the product lifecycle costs are committed at design stage, this is clearly a critical stage in the overall product design process. The concept of design for manufacture may be found across most engineering disciplines, but the specific details will clearly vary according to the manufacturing technologies being harnessed. Getting this right will have an important impact on the product’s viability throughout its lifecycle.

ESCATEC has considerable experience in working with customers at this critical stage to help to ensure that their designs are optimised for the manufacturing processes that will be used downstream and that all factors such as component specifications, dimensional tolerances and the required secondary processes are all considered.

This approach is applied equally to all manufacturing projects that ESCATEC undertake, i.e., PCB assemblies, box build assemblies, cable harnesses and looms, panel wiring, system integration and electro-mechanical builds.

Design for Manufacture has the potential to generate significant improvements, such as:

• Enhanced manufacturing productivity
• Improved product quality and reliability
• Reduced/simplified maintenance
• Reduced cost
• Decreased time to market
• Increased customer satisfaction

Design for Test (DFT) sometimes called Design for Testability is the element of the design effort that focusses on ensuring that the required level of testability features are incorporated into hardware product designs in order to make it easier to develop and apply manufacturing tests.

This is a critical process as PCB assemblies have become increasingly more complex and the ability to test these using traditional methods and systems has become more difficult. Therefore considering design for test in the early stages of product development is vitally important in order to ensure that adequate fault coverage and diagnostic ability is available. 

DFT delivers benefits including:

• Increased test coverage
• Reduced test times
• Simpler test requirements

A Design for Quality (DfQ) strategy identifies potential product and process failure risks as early as possible to ensure they are ‘designed out’ of the product.  

A DfQ approach can prevent you from getting locked into compliant but not necessarily cost-effective designs.  If a design has proceeded to the prototype stage and been validated for regulatory compliance, you may be committed to manufacturing a product in a certain way for a lengthy period. It might not make sense to re-submit your design to regulators at that point - so your ROI and customer value could be severely impacted.  

At ESCATEC we take a holistic approach to DfQ so that the best value and quality outcomes for customers are always achieved.

DfQ ensures quality by:

• Identifying potential quality risks through Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA), ranking potential severity of failures and prioritising areas for action.
• Ensuring products are designed so they can only be assembled one specific way, minimising potential non-conformities.
• Simplifying the design to reduce costs and the risk of failure.
• Standardising parts where possible so compliance is easier to establish.
• Having a multi-functional team of experts to drive the process ensures the overall quality of the product is maintained within the design.
• Ensuring required documentation is completed within the design process helps prove regulatory compliance - helping you achieve ISO 13485, ISO 9001, CE marking and FDA certification as required.  
• Ensuring design processes are stage-gated to continually validate deliverables against engineering/customer/regulatory requirements. Stage gating your design process is a requirement of the medical device development standard ISO 13485:2016.
• Ensuring required manufacturing processes are documented, validated, and engineers are appropriately trained to produce the product to the right standard.

Product designs can often have unintended environmental consequences, including:

• High levels of waste through a lack of repairability. 
• Damaging emissions during production.
• Use of unsustainable materials. 
• Potential to pollute after disposal. 
• An unoptimised supply chain with a large carbon footprint. 

By bringing expert manufacturing teams into your design process you can ensure, from the outset, you are following best practice laid out in various environmental codes, including these standards and regulations:

• ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive), 
• REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals)
• WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment recycling) standards