There are a million different aspects you have to keep in mind when you are bringing your design to life and to the store shelves. The two most important, in our opinion, are defining what you will build and cost-effectively manage it all the way through how you will build it. Keep reading to discover how you can create a seamless transition from design to manufacturing in your company. 

Setting Yourself Apart

Gaining a competitive advantage is one of the first hoops your company has to jump through. In the chart, you can see the top ways companies are making their products stand out. As companies strive to outdo one another, it has come to light that focusing on one aspect to differentiate your product is not enough. In today’s market, your product has to have excellent performance, be innovative and offer high quality.

This provides a unique challenge because too much focus on making your product stand out can distract from hitting deadlines or keeping costs low. But if you don’t put enough focus on it, your competitors may steal your place in the market. One of the best ways to achieve this is to integrate your engineering and manufacturing teams. You will be able to win customers over, increase revenue and boost profitability!

Saving Time and Money by Working Together

Did you know that by the end of your design process, you have already determined 70 to 80 percent of final production costs and 80 percent of the work impacting product quality? Plus, the deeper you are in the development cycle, the more expensive it is to make changes. This is due to the fact that as the design evolves, the aspects get locked down, making even small adjustments extremely complicated and impacts multiple components. As you continue further down the design and manufacturing road, soon any revision means costly scrap and rework.

If your manufacturing team doesn’t have insight into the design until the release, you may end up paying much more. Having your engineering and manufacturing team collaborating through the entire process will not only help save money by not having to make costly changes later but could save you money. Including the manufacturing team in the beginning allows them to provide options to save cost, improve quality and fix problems that could pop up in production. 

Cost of Not Collaborating

Collaboration doesn’t just provide you a competitive advantage. If your company doesn’t integrate the teams, many problems arise. As you can see in the chart, there are many business costs associated with poor team collaboration. 

Engineering and manufacturing teams must be able to share and exchange design information. This typically means the data is imported and repaired. The process is tedious, time-consuming and the translation process can produce new errors. Then, if there any other design problems found during production, there will be further delays. Every problem requires time to create a solution, putting schedules at risk and delaying time-to-market. To minimize the time delays and cost, the fix tends to be whatever is quick and easy. However, this may hurt quality, which can tank market success and lead to lost revenue opportunities. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg! Instantly download our white paper, SOLIDWORKS Smart Manufacturing to learn more.