New Product Development: 3 Ways to Accelerate Your Process

Recognize Your Assumptions

• What are your predictions?
• What could go wrong?
• Who else could you ask to get additional perspective?

Disprove Your Assumptions

• How can you prove yourself wrong?
• What are the primary failure points?

Test Early and Often

• How can you mockup a design to test your assumption?
• Are you rushing to get to the next phase?
• What else are you missing?

New Product Development: Assumption Testing Worksheet

Save time and money by investing early in testing your assumptions. This worksheet allows you and your team to plan and track your new product assumption testing. By doing so, you will identify risks early and save yourself resources before moving to manufacture.

New Product Development Case Study

Situation: Overmolded Container

A medical client needed an overmolded container. The substrate had a heavily ribbed area. This ribbed area was necessary to maintain uniform wall, which would prevent sink, and maintain the geometry for the intended function. Simply put, the flat wall had to stay flat in order to interface with the mating component, which also had a flat wall.

The Natech engineers created samples based on the original design with the heavy ribbing. However, during sampling they found bumps or bubbles on the overmold in the heavily ribbed area and could not process the bumps out. The bubbles caused an aesthetic nonconformity on the visible surface of the part.

The client made a design change that they believed would eliminate the bubbling, seen in the image below. This involved updating the mold to remove one portion of the ribs. Unfortunately, after making the mold change, the bubbling remained, and the client turned to Natech for help.

A new tool modification would take several weeks and might or might not have worked. The Natech Engineers followed the four steps of Lean Product Development.

Hypothesize & Plan

The Natech engineers knew the design had horizontal and vertical ribs that came together at intersections. This created pockets in the substrate.

The team hypothesized that these pockets could cause the bubbling issues. Those pockets might have been trapping gas and air. The gas could not properly vent from the tool.

To incorporate these design changes and test out the hypothesis, the engineers manually removed the horizontal ribs from the substrate. They wanted to allow the flow to push the gas so that the gas would vent out through the parting line.

Test

The engineers tested their hypothesis by cutting out the ribs in the substrates. You can see the substrate does not look pretty, but as a mockup, it worked. They took these substrates to the press to overmold them.

Solution:

After overmolding, they found no more bubbles. They concluded that the pockets formed by the ribs caused the bubbling. Then, our engineers made the change in steel, ran new samples, and found the bubbling nonconformity alleviated.

The Natech engineers accelerated the new product development process by recognizing their assumptions, forming hypotheses to disprove their assumptions, and creating quick tests for their hypotheses.

The process of lean product development allows products to go through an iterative process of testing and improving. Following this cycle helped the client avoid spending unnecessary time and money.