Avoiding Design Stress Disorder: Outsourcing Product Development for Winning Products

Randal B. Chinnock

I swear at my toaster oven. Don't get me wrong -- it's not the kind of thing I do to amuse myself on a Saturday night. It is the result of what I call "Design Stress Disorder". This is the reaction people have to poorly designed products. It starts with confusion when the product doesn't work well: Am I using it wrong? The victim's feelings then move into disbelief, irritation, and the urge to fling objects out of high windows. The toaster oven I hate is slow to heat and cooks so unevenly it sears a black line across my toast while leaving the rest raw. For an encore, the rack falls out if something as heavy as a Pyrex bowl of lasagna is placed on it.

You do not want your customers to develop Design Stress Disorder when they use your products. They will write you nasty letters and never buy your products again. So how do you avoid this manufacturer's purgatory?

Design your products right the first time, using the right tools and the right people. Part of this means using the best design software applications and people who are expert at using them. If you don't have these tools and staff in your organization, outsource the work.

The current generation of product design software is amazing. At the heart of most product design efforts is a mechanical design (CAD) program. The best CAD programs are called "solid modelers", because they create extremely realistic 3-dimensional parts. The parts can be viewed at any angle, rotated, cut, and examined on the computer screen. They can then be mated with other parts to create an assembly. The assemblies can be analyzed to determine how they respond to mechanical stress, extremes of temperature, and dynamic effects such as shock and vibration. Plastic parts can be analyzed to determine how well they'll mold, what residual stress will remain in the part, and whether the part will warp or deform from this stress as it cools after molding. If one part in an assembly is generating heat, these finite element analysis (FEA) programs can calculate how the heat is conducted and dissipated, and whether parts that people can touch will get too hot. Not long ago, massive mainframe computers were required for these kinds of tasks. Now, they are performed on high-end desktop computers. This enables the manufacturer to learn all of this information before spending a nickel on making actual products.

In the case of the toaster oven, a rendering program could have first been used to develop an aesthetic shape, and to create a pleasing color scheme. Each of the toaster's parts - the cover, door, bottom, sides, handle, rack, knobs - could then have been modeled, mated, and toleranced to insure proper fit. The radiation pattern from the heating elements could have been analyzed to determine not only how uniformly the toaster will cook, but how hot the outside surfaces will become, heading off potential liability suits. The rack, which is made out of chrome-plated steel wire, could have been subjected to an FEA analysis, which would have quickly shown that it bent too much under a reasonable weight load, causing it to fall out of its guide slots.

Sometimes design defects have much more serious results. In the medical field, products must be designed extremely carefully to insure that they don't fail during use and harm a patient or doctor. Failures can be caused by parts coming loose, by software or electronic circuits that go haywire, or by poorly designed controls that lead to operator error.

In the laboratory automation field, such as the automated processing of PAP smear slides to detect cervical cancer, complex systems with optical, mechanical, electronic, and software components must work together with great precision. If not, the resulting errors can be disastrous. False positives inflict patient anxiety, while false negatives can result in disease and death. During the development of such systems, the optical imaging system is designed and tested on the computer before any lenses are ground and polished. The mechanics are subjected to repeated actuations in an FEA program to insure they keep their precision after millions of cycles. Software is put through its paces to insure that incipient, undetected defects "fail safe". The results from these tests are used to modify the design while it's still in the computer, saving a lot of fabrication expense.

Product Development firms offer manufacturers specialized expertise for creating safe, innovative, and profit-generating products. Such firms range in size from the solo designer to the 500-person full service giant. Some firms specialize in certain areas, such as consumer products or the auto industry, while others are general. Some are more oriented toward the softer "design" expertise, while others have greater engineering depth. In choosing a firm, look for one that has experience in your field. They should understand the fabrication technologies involved in the manufacture of your product, and be able to work closely with your internal resources. Most importantly, find a firm that listens, understands your markets and goals, and innovates all the way to the winner's circle.

Optimum Technologies, Inc. is the northeast's only full service product development firm specializing in optical instruments and medical devices. Located in Southbridge, MA, at the heart of Optics Valley, they have collective experience of over 500 years in the design, development, prototyping, and production of innovative products.

Published by the Smaller Business Association of New England, 2001

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