MANUFACTURING MISTAKES

In This Episode: I am going to own my mistakes ** Mistakes are going to happen and are par for the course ** What's important is that you have a system in place to deal with mistakes ** Figure out why the mistake happened in the first place ** There are always mistakes that have to be budgeted for ** Your prototype costs are not your manufacturing costs ** Do you have a process in place for catching mistakes and fixing them ** Testing and user experience ** Injection molding costs and customer testing ** How are you going to make it now and later at scale? ** Maybe for product testing we just use 3D printing or thermoforming ** Manufacturing and dealing with scrap pieces ** Understanding the failures in the manufacturing process ** Who pays for the failures? ** Do you understand the process? ** There's a lot of planning, whiteboarding, user and market intel before we ever get to build stage ** The cliche that I think is true is "haste makes waste" ** We should have built in higher tolerances for parts that came from an external vendor ** How do we tackle delays in development or costs higher than expected? ** We ask the questions our members never think to ask ** Don't assume a manufacturer's parts are always the same ** What are their shop tolerances and are these called out on your prints ** If every dimension is a critical dimension, you need precise and accurate manufacturing ** Have your tolerances on your print set and find a manufacturer that can hit those tolerances ** Ask what the manufacturer shop tolerances are per process. Each process may be different ** Usually we start with proof of concept ** It all flows from what the user profile is and how they will use the product.