Month: July 2014

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Podcast: Developing A Product

Developing a successful new product requires funding and resources.  Lets spend a few minutes talking about how all those fit together with the product development process.

Developing A Product
Transcript

Audio File: 2014 Feb 12 – Developing A Product.mp3
Audio Length: 8:07 minutes

Hello. My name is Montie Roland. I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina.

Whenever you undertake the development of a new product, there’s a series of decisions that go into that product at a very early stage. One of the things that’s very, very important to do is to validate that you should build the product. Because if you build a product that won’t sell, then you’ve tied up resources in something that will never generate a return on investment. So one of the things that I think is very, very important is to develop a skill set of saying, Okay, here’s why I think this product will sell; being able to work through a process of helping you get to that validation. And then being able to take the results of that validation and make a go or no-go decision. This really applies to all practitioners, be it corporate in a monster company, a medium-sized company, or an entrepreneur or inventor.

So, let’s start out with a case of being an inventor. Or, actually, I take that back. Let’s look at it from a hundred thousand foot view. So, some of the things that have to happen before you can sell your product – one is that you’ve got to have the money to develop it; you’ve got to have the money to manufacture the first run; and then you’ve got to have the money to market it. Many times – individuals especially; entrepreneurs or what have you – will say I’ll find the money; let me develop the product first. Well, in a way they’re getting the cart before the horse for a couple of reasons. One is that you want to make sure that your development of products that someone will help you fund (if you’re looking for that kind of thing; you’re looking for external funding), and then the other is that you want to make sure that you’ve thought through these first stages. So, things that need to be considered, or issues that need to be considered: One is what’s the development cost? And can you afford the development cost? Two, what does it cost to manufacture the products? Can you afford that first run of products? Three, what does it cost to market the product? And do you have everything in place that you need to do this? Now, in a big corporation this is broken down into segments, generally. So, there’s a group within the corporation that handles marketing. There’s a group that handles sales. A lot of product specifications are determined by the sales group, because they see a hole in the market, or they have requests from clients that want Product A. So, in a larger corporation you’ll have a multi-service team that will look at this from two directions – look at it from an accounting standpoint or a financial standpoint, a business standpoint, an engineering standpoint. And so go through those motions before the product is actually kicked off, just to make sure it’s the right product and they’ve got a way to pay for it.

Other organizations that are smaller may skip parts of this process. Entrepreneurs are notorious for doing this, because the fun part is designing the product; the fun part is usually not figuring out how to pay for it. So a lot of times entrepreneurs will put a lot of work into a product because they think it will succeed based on not a lot of research, and then they’ll get to the end of the product development cycle and either have developed the wrong product (which won’t sell), or they’ve just developed a product that won’t sell; or, because they’re out of resources, now all of a sudden, they can’t go any farther. We see a lot of the latter. That’s pretty common. So there’s a lot of great products that sit on the shelf and die.

So before you undertake that project, I would say consider – Do you have the money for each step of the way? And really you need to have the money for enough to keep you going through the ramp up of the adoption curve. And the adoption curve is how quickly people pick up a product or buy a product after its released; how long does it take the market to respond to that product. And that adoption curve is definitely there. It’s exponential, so it’s flat at the bottom when you’re first starting out; and then at some point we all hope it goes exponential vertically.

And then the next question is do you have the resources to pull it off – Do you have the engineering resources? Can you afford to buy them if you don’t? Do you have the management resources? Do you have the facilities resources? Most companies fail because of the management, not because of the product. Most product given companies do.

So I think its important to lay these things out, make a decision about them, whether or not you have them; make a decision about, you know, is it the right product; is it the right market; is this a difficult market. And that way you’ve made these decisions upfront before you’ve committed a lot of time and money to something that you may realize later on wasn’t such a good idea. So by doing this you’ll actually save yourself effort in the long run; you’ll be better prepared to design your product; and there’ll be less risk as part of the process.

If you have any thoughts or comments about my comments or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to give me a call – 1-800-722-7987. Shoot me an email – Montie (M-O-N-T-I-E ) @ Montie dot com. Or, visit us – www.montie.com. Thanks and have a great day.

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Podcast: Understanding Injection Molding Quotes

Understanding Injection Molding Quotes
[Transcript]
Audio File: 2014 Mar 14 – Understanding Injection Molding Quotes.mp3
Audio Length: 20:19 minutes

Hi, my name is Montie Roland. And I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina. We’re a full-service product development firm providing engineering services, industrial design services, and prototyping. So, we can help you design it; help you think through the concept; and then build you a prototype and provide the assistance you need to make the connections you need to manufacture your product, domestically or abroad.

This morning I’d like to talk about understanding an injection mold quote. And really, this . . . when you look at it and break it down, this also applies to most other manufacturing processes, the way that it’s structured.

So, if we’re going to create an injection-molded part, we need two things upfront. One thing is we need a completed design – and that needs to be in 3-D CAD – and then we also need to know what the material . . . materials used in the product are, which is really part of the design, but let’s break it out for the purposes of this discussion. That completed design is going to include 3-D geometry that you’re going to release to the molder as a .STEP file or a .IGES file. And it’s also going to include a drawing. That drawing will include any critical dimensions, any critical to function, any inspection dimensions. Also, secondary operations – if you’ve got a drill a hole in the part; or if you’ve got to put a threaded insert in.

So the drawing is no longer what we call “fully descriptive”. Fifteen years ago, drawings had to describe everything that you wanted to control about that part. If you wanted to control the size of a radius, you needed to create a section view and show that radius. Which, you can imagine, for an injection molded part, was an onerous task, because there’s a lot of details in a part like that. So, now what’s happened is we have parts that are defined in 3-D on the CAD – it’s in SolidWorks or ProEngineer; Catia; Unigraphics; what have you. And so those parts give a tremendous amount of information to the mold maker. So, no longer is the mold maker having to interpret a drawing. A lot of their tool pass and a lot of their mold design comes from your model directly, which makes for quicker tool builds because they don’t have to model the part. And also more accurate because they’re not interpreting from a 2-D drawing.

So, .STEP file; drawing, probably in a PDF format; and then your material choice. With plastics there’s a whole bewildering array of materials. A lot of times, though, parts end up being made out of common materials, such as ABS or nylon. These materials can also be filled. You can use a mineral fill, like a talc; you can have a foaming agent if you want to have a part that is a foam part. You can also fill it with fibers – long or short. And those fibers can give materials like nylon really, really great stiffness. And so you select that material. If you have questions about that, you know, the best thing to do is ask someone who has a good background in plastics injection molding. Also, you can work with your material provider. Depending on how exotic the material is, you may have to make a choice between . . . you may have to choose a provider like RTP that provides smaller quantities if you want something that’s more of a custom material. You remember, a lot of plastics are sold by the train car load, so if you make a few thousand parts, obviously, you use a lot less than a train car load. So, a custom material means you go to someone who deals in custom materials like RTP – which drives the cost per pound up dramatically. But if you have an application where you need some exotic properties, you can get them.

So when you go out for a quote – we had another podcast for our covered . . . you know, the mechanics of that – when that quote comes back, it’s going to have several items on it. And even if those items are buried in the price, they’re still there. The first item is the cost of your tool, your capital cost. You’ve got to build a tool to make an injection molded part. That tooling price, we have seen prices fluctuate dramatically and all over the board. But, really, there’s several main options. One option is what we’ll call is a temporary tool for very low-volume manufacturing. A good example of this is Protomold. Twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred bucks; they can have you a tool. The parts are probably three . . . four . . . five-X; maybe eight or nine . . . ten-X what it would cost a traditional molder; however, if you only need a hundred injection molded parts, there’s no point in building a fifteen thousand dollar tool and making five thousand as a test run if you only need a hundred. So, I oftentimes . . . companies like Protomold are very good at that. And the traditional molders, they may be abroad or they may be domestic. And so, any of these folks are going to give you a quote for the tooling. And that cost will vary, depending on if it’s a temporary aluminum tool, if it’s a aluminum tool, or if it’s a steel tool. An aluminum tool may make tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand parts. A steel tool may make millions of parts. So, the choice of your tool is dependent upon the process you need . . . or, excuse me, the number of parts you need that tool to last. Often, aluminum tools are adequate until you get to a real high volume.

The other thing that happens with injection molded parts is that often your toolmaker’s going to use what’s called a mud base, rather than make a full-up tool. What that means is that they have a standard tool skeleton, let’s call it. A skeleton has a giant hole in the middle, and what they do is they build a what’s called a mud base; it’s an insert that goes in that hole in the middle and connects up to the tool. That way you don’t have to pay for the entire tool; you just pay for a small part of it, which helps keep the cost down. And that’s totally fine.

If you’re going to make a tool abroad and you want to bring it home for domestic production, you need to make sure that the molder is involved in this process so that you end up with a tool that they can actually use. It’s common for . . . issues like fittings that are commonly available in China but aren’t available here to cause problems or, you know, some configuration that your molder can’t support. So often, if you go abroad for your tools, a good choice is to let your molder source that tool for you.

So, we’ve got a capital expense of the tool. The next thing is we have an expense of setting up the molder. So, this is a . . . in [inaudible 0:08:11.8] non-recurring engineering cost where they take the tool to the machine; they pull the tool that’s in the machine out (previous job); they put yours in. Some of these tools can get big and heavy so it’s an involved process to switch them out. Then what they do is they switch out the material in the hoppers and the screws, and put the material you want in there; dial in the temperature – temperature, pressure and timing are all very important for injection molding. And so they set that up; do a few test farts. This may only take a couple of hours; however, the thing to consider is that the molder has lost use of the machine. Not only are they doing work to get your mold in place, and it’s probably . . . set up guys an expensive employee-per-hour, but they’re also losing the use of that machine. So, you’re paying for machine time (where you’re not making parts), and you’re paying for a service, which is getting your tool up and running. And so, at first you say, well, that should come out of the profit. Well, by understanding and breaking these costs down, you can make better decisions, because a lot of times what will happen is you’re right – it will get hidden in the cost of the part. But – that drives the cost of the part up. So there’s a better way to do this as far as calculating what your run’s going to cost you. So, if we know the set-up cost, and then we get a part, a cost-per-part. Now, one of the things that everybody says is, Well, if I make a hundred thousand or ten thousand, I should get a much reduced cost per part. Well, the reason why you’re cost per part goes down is that you’ve amortized the set-up costs across a number of parts. So what this means is that let’s say your set up cost is five hundred dollars. And you make five hundred parts. Then that cost gets amortized over that run, and so that’s a dollar a part you’ve added to the cost of your parts. If you make five thousand parts, then you’ve added ten cents a part to the cost of your part. If you make fifty thousand, then you’ve added one cent to the cost of your part. And if you make a hundred thousand, you’ve added half a cent to the cost of your part.

So this is important to keep in mind because if you know the cost per part, which really doesn’t change because it’s a function of machine time; machine costs you this much to rent, costs you this much in plastic per part (your part weighs so many ounces), and it takes this long. Cycle time is a HUGH issue in production. Even a small amount of reduction in cycle time can help reduce the cost of your part over time. I guess really . . . let me restate that. A small reduction in cycle time is something that can impact a lot of dollars in profit; it can have a big impact on your profit over time, because that cycle time is never going to change. The design of that part, until you make a change to it, is going to stay the same; and the cycle time is going to stay the same, as long as the design and the tools stay the same. Cycle time is a function of how long the part takes to cool. The thicker the wall, the longer the cooling time. So you can’t remove the part from the tool, from the injection molding machine, until it’s reached a minimum temperature. So that temperature comes from that plastic cooling, the outside cooling first and the inside cooling slower. If you pull it out too soon, you can imagine you can do all kind of . . . create all kind of problems with the part because it’s soft. So that change in your design to keep the walls thin helps reduce your costs, now and in the future, by reducing the cycle time, which reduces the cost per part. The cost of each part, after the machine is set up, is driven by the cycle time, the material cost (which is generally done per pound), the secondary operations that have to be performed, and then the cost of any items needed to perform those operations. So, for example, if you’re snapping a lens in, you’ve got a couple of costs: you’ve got the cost of the lens, and you’ve got the cost of the time for someone to manually snap that in.

You can mold around items in the tool. The challenge there is that you’ve got to take the time to place that item while the tool is open. So often, secondary operations are performed after the part has finished molding, because that way you’ve got an operator there anyway; they can perform that operation and you’re making use of idle time, rather than keeping the tool open while you load something in the tool. A good example’s a threaded insert. Generally, threaded inserts are added after the part’s molded, because if you add them before the part’s molded, what you have to do is keep the tool open long enough for the individual or the robot to place that threaded insert. So, instead of opening the tool, dropping out the top part, and then closing the tool immediately and start making the next part, you can create a situation where you’re loading, I don’t know, let’s say six threaded inserts and it takes two seconds, or five seconds; so, that robot’s reaching in, loading that threaded insert, but that tool is not making parts at that point. So, most of the time, you’ll . . . the molder will insert that threaded insert after the part’s out of the tool so that the injection molding machine can go ahead and start making parts.

And that’s an important consideration that your molder will help you with. But that all rolls into the cost of that. If you have to program a robot to do a secondary, you may save some money in a very long production run, but the cost of the programming the robot and setting it up still has to be amortized across that number of parts. So, there again, set up cost and then actual production part cost for that part.

Same thing holds true for other operations. So, for example, C&C; you got to set up the C&C machine. You’ve got to fixture the parts, set up that fixture. You’ve got to program the machine or transfer the program into the machine. You’ve got to do a run off. So, that situation is very comparable. You’ve got a set up cost and you’ve got a piece cost. Piece cost really doesn’t change all that much, but the set up cost just gets amortized across that piece cost. So, that’s important to keep that in mind. And, sure, if you go to a company and say, I’m going to give you an order for ten million of these – can I get a break? Okay, gotcha; they’ll give you a break. But that’s going to be a small break and that’s . . . you’re not going to see the hard cost going half or something; you may see a few percent off, just as a way to close that deal. Because, at the end of the day, it costs them time on that machine and they’re going to charge you for that time and those materials, and amortize your set up across the number of parts in that run. And, if they give you one number that says this batch of parts, this quantity, will cost you this much, then really is what they’re doing is they’re just bundling that all together. They’re putting the set up cost in, the part cost in and they’re giving you one number. In my mind, you’re much better off to break it out and have a fixed price per part, and have a fixed set up cost. And then what you can do, as the manufacturer, is to decide how many parts you want to make. If you want to make one part, you can do that. But you know what the set up cost is, you know what the piece cost is, and make one part. Now, a lot of molders probably won’t set up for one part because it’s not profitable, but you get the idea there. But that way if you want to make a hundred, you want to make five hundred, you can set up your spreadsheet and do your math. You can conserve capital where you need to and you can take advantage of that economy of scale where you need to.

So, that’s, hopefully, given you an understanding of how to price or how to work with the prices you get from the molder, and turn around and price your products. It’s really not a complicated set up. A lot of molders have switched over to giving you a set up cost plus a piece cost. And it works much better in my mind because you actually know how that price is derived, and you can pick an intermediate quantity. Say you have a price of five hundred and a price for two thousand; well, now if I need seven hundred and fifty, I can calculate out what that price would be, and do it exactly. Because I have the formula here.

So, hopefully this has been beneficial. Just one little tech tip here and as you’re working through your new product. If you like what you heard and need some of this experience and skills we have, give us a call. We will be happy to help with your next project; we’re happy to do your next project, start to finish. Our job is to be ready when you are.

This is Montie Roland, signing off.

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Podcast: Tips for Improving your RFQs

Status:  You have drawings and 3D CAD files and need a prototype

Next Step:  Interacting with vendors to promptly get quotes

How do you do this?  What is the best way to put you and your vendors in a win-win situation.  Join me for the next few minutes while we talk about this.

Requesting A Quote

Cheers,
Montie
President
Montie Design

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Audio File: 2014 Mar 14 – Requesting A Quote.mp3
Audio Length: 21:19 minutes

Hello. My name is Montie Roland. And I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina.

And what I’d like to do is spend a few minutes talking about a very simple topic, and that’s how to go after a quote. And maybe throw out some of my thoughts on what are good ways to manage the process and have a consistent process so you get consistent results.

Montie Design is a full-service product development firm with concentrations in mechanical engineering and industrial design and prototyping. We can take your product and go from concept to engineered design to something on the shipping dock, ready for you to ship.

When it comes time in the process of your engineering work to request a quote, it’s important to have a good process that consistently gets you accurate quotes in a timely manner. And that’s really what you want. You want to get those quotes back quickly, and you want to have them accurate and you want vendors that understand what you want. So part of that accuracy is putting together a technical data package that matches what you expect. If your documentation is sloppy, then your quote runs the risk of being off. Because some vendor may think that they’re providing what you want, when really they’re providing something else because the data you gave them wasn’t clear.

So there’s several steps to this process. One step is to select your vendors. I would encourage you to select vendors as early as possible so that you can have them involved in the design process. Now, in order to do that, you’re probably going to need to have a limited number of vendors – maybe even one or two – so that they have a shot at getting the business. Because if you get them involved in the design process, they have a lot of feedback for you, help you improve your product, and then never giving them that business over time, then they’ll lose their enthusiasm for helping you. Now, I don’t know that they have to get the business every time. I think, though, that, you know, over the course of two or three of these opportunities they need to see some business coming their way to really keep them incentivized, to participate as fully as you’d like. This is a little different than a lot of approaches because so many times people want the absolute lowest cost. But the thing you trade is that you may have vendors are less interested in providing you feedback by going with a low cost vendor all the time. So the vendor who’s the lowest cost may also be a low value vendor. They may not give you the product you want back or give you quality that’s unacceptable. And it’s especially bad if either the quality isn’t there – or – somehow they’ve built a product that just isn’t what you want; maybe there’s some differences and they didn’t ask the questions that they should have, because maybe they’re pretty tightly cost constrained. So that’s why, when you think about that, you want to have vendors that you can trust and that you can go to time and time again, and get repeatable, reliable, quality work from them.

So once you’ve selected vendors you want to send out RFQs to; then what you want to do is to understand client’s motivation or your constituent’s motivation. If there is already a vendor that’s preferred, and that vendor’s pretty much going to get it no matter what, then if you have a relationship with the second and third vendors that you’re going out for quotes for, you may want to consider letting them know – “Hey, this is probably going to be a second or third quote, and it looks like we may have this vendor.” And if they know you, then they’re going to understand that, obviously, unless you use this vendor all the time and will never go anywhere else, if there’s some specific reason that you’re going only to one vendor, then other vendors you know, if you tell them that, then they’re not going to need to put as much time in that quote. A lot of them will still give you a quote because they want to help you there, and part of that helping is staying on the RFQ list for the next one – but, so, they’re not going to feel like they’ve got to do as much pencil sharpening and have as tight of a quote, which requires more work. So that way you save them time; you’ve let them really know what’s going on; you’ve double-checked (at least in a rough way) that your primary vendor is giving you a reasonable price. And that’s a good way to communicate with those vendors. Now, if you don’t know the vendor and you’re telling him that, they may or may not send you a quote.

So that also brings of the thought of its good to know your vendors. Take your vendors to lunch. Don’t make them take you to lunch; you take them to lunch. Get to know them. Barbecue. You know, go to the rifle range. Go mountain biking. You know, those relationship opportunities help mean that when that vendor has a question, that vendor will ask you. One of the last things you want is unanswered questions, because that question may mean the difference between having a container full of junk, and having a container full of the product you really want. And so that relationship makes them feel comfortable giving you a phone call and saying, What do you think? Or maybe making a suggestion. We have one vendor that’s absolutely spectacular – ADR – and they’ve actually come back several times and said, We think you ought to do it this way. Once or twice they made some prototypes, and so, What do you think? That’s the kind of vendor that goes out of their way to give you quality product and keep your business. I mean, those guys, like said, they’ve done that. They have brought me a part they made and says, Here’s how we think it should be done. Not being proactive and not waiting on us to do something, but, hey, they’ve got AutoCAD; they made a change, they cut it and brought it over.

So, when you have that kind of vendor . . . those vendors are gold. You keep those vendors. You hold onto those vendors. You protect those vendors. And I think it’s important, too, and I want to digress a little bit here, is that if there’s issues in a project, then you want to make sure that your vendor is protected in appropriate ways. So if a vendor totally drops the ball and made a horrendous error somewhere, then most of the time they’re going to fix it. So, and they know that; they know there was an error. So, letting all the crap hit them, politically, doesn’t . . . isn’t always the best thing because it’s going to leave a bad taste in their mouth, even if it was their fault. So I think one of the things I encourage my folks to do is that if you communicate clearly if there’s a vendor with a vendor; but, we need to be the ones to man up with the clients and say, Hey, we goofed up. Because ultimately we’re the ones that selected that vendor. We’re the ones that had control over that vendor. And if there’s a mistake, the buck should stop with us, not with the vendor. And we’ve had times when a vendor did drop the ball and, you know, simple things sometimes cause problems, like a part that’s almost done and somebody sits it back on the machine upside-down and now the hole’s in the wrong place. Got it. But at the same time, you know, they recut those parts; there’s no point in beating on them or letting our customer beat on them. Because, you know, they’re serving us and we’re going to have that vendor relationship, I hope, long after that client’s doing something else. And that’s the thing, too. Clients are important. I’m not downplaying the value of the client relationship at all. With clients, though, we’ll see a client and we won’t see them for two or three years. And then we’ll have another interaction, or maybe a year. With vendors, we see them every month. And so this vendor is helping us with multiple . . . pick a vendor; he’s usually helping us with multiple clients, not just one. They’re helping with client after client after client. So that makes that relationship with that vendor, in my mind, just golden. So that’s why I think you want to take care of those vendors. You know, somehow, you can pay that vendor early; some companies don’t care. You know, bigger company, nobody may even know that. A smaller company, if they get a check ahead of time, or maybe they get a check at the dock, you can bet that if you’re ever the one in a jam, you’re more likely for them to stay late or come in early, or reshuffle things around to help you out, because you did something for them. Holding onto a check for a few more days, if you’ve got the cash to make, you know, I don’t know, 0.07% return on, it’s nowhere near as big a return as that vendor really wants your business. That’s the big return. And so doing things like, if you can, paying them early; taking care of them; these are things that help spur that relationship in the long run.

So, we’ve selected a vendor. Now the next thing is to get together our technical data package. What should that package have? That package, in general, should have non-parametric files (non-parametric files being PDFs, DXFs, DWGs, STEP files, IGES files); these are files that aren’t parametric from your CAD system. And by that, what I mean is that if I have a file that’s in SolidWorks, that SolidWorks file (say a part file) can be linked to a drawing file and assembly. And so, someone who’s not careful in how they deal with those files, when they bring that file up, if it can’t find the correct file that it’s wanting to reference – and it happens to grab a different file – then you can have a mistake appear in a drawing; even though it was saved in another way, all of a sudden, now, you can have a mistake show up in a drawing or in a CAD file because of these linkages. And I don’t want to get too far off on that subject; just to say that, in general, we try to give out fixed, non-parametric files (BAC/SiS, STEP, IGES, PDF) because those aren’t easily editable and those aren’t parametric. So they are what you give. We have some clients that want SolidWorks files. We can provide that. We always try to be careful, though, to provide an entire archive and make sure that everybody is well-communicated to about what the contents are, revisions levels, and so forth. The other thing you want to do is make sure your drawings are appropriate for the purpose. A lot of parts are made now from the CAD file, from an IGES or STEP file. And what that means is that fully dimensioning a drawing does not need to happen anymore, which saves you time and effort; saves your client money. And, the drawings now a lot of times will focus on things like GD&T or linear tolerancing or other things like call-outs, for material, finish, tapped holes. You know, you can machine a block of aluminum from a CAD file; the only thing that’s hard to do is to figure out is that . . . that quarter inch hole, is that tapped quarter-twenty; or is that a through hole. So, you show that on the drawings; you know, show where pins go, what pins are inserted there and so forth. And so your assembly drawings, your part drawings, your drawings of inseparable assemblies – those should go in your technical data file. Any 3-D geometry, if it’s going to be a part that’s going to be cut in 2-D, for example, water jet or some machine shops may want to program some parts as a two-and-a-half axis job; in that case you’ll need to include DXF – DWG. And I’ve got a white paper you can get off Montie.com that shows you how to understand what tolerances you can actually hole with the CNC process. That may be something to check out and gives you kind of an idea of, you know, where’s a starting point for what you can expect.

If you’re going to send a drawing to an unknown vendor, then you’re going to spend more time documenting. You want to make sure that drawing has more information. If you don’t know how that vendor’s going to make the part, whether it’s from an IGES file or STEP file or if they’re going to make it from the drawing, then you may end up needing a full set of drawings. In a lot of cases, full drawings aren’t used anymore. For example, tooling. You know, its . . . it’s just too many details to spend that much time drawing it when tools are made, early injection mold tools and die cast are not made from 2-D drawings anymore. They’re made from 3-D geometry.

So now what we do is grab a bill of materials and include that if it has multiple parts or assemblies. Put that together in an archive, send it out; make sure that you’re clear about any deviations from the drawing that you want on the quote. For example, if you want to get the parts back without finish, then put that on your RFQ. Make that its clear, you know, what comprises a set, or do you want piece parts; do you want assembly; do you want a test assembly to occur before you get it. You know, these process things that may not be obvious on a drawing, but you need to include on your RFQ. Send that RFQ out. Let your vendors know when you need it back. I mean, it sounds simple, but a lot of people don’t. And so if you need a RFQ back in four weeks, let your vendor know that they’ve got four weeks. They’re probably not going to take that long but that way they can prioritize. There again, you’re helping them make your life easier by making their easier. And if, also, too, if all you ever do is say “I need quotes back tomorrow”, then eventually, your vendors aren’t going to take you seriously when you say that. So I would much rather tell a vendor “Hey, can I get something back in two weeks” if that’s really what I need. That way, when I show up on their doorstep and I say to them “I need a quote, NOW”, they realize that I really need a quote now. And so, that whole concept of, I guess, political capital, if you want to put it that way; you know, you’ve got so much and if you burn it unnecessarily, then your vendor’s not going to take those priority requests seriously if it always happens. Same thing on lead time. If you have a part that’s going to take, you know, six weeks, and you need it in five, you need to let the vendor know. But don’t tell him two just because. So you want to make sure you work with your vendors and clearly communicate when the deliveries are, so that that way, they can prioritize their production. There again, you’re helping make their life easier, so they appreciate that. And that keeps those channels of communication open.

So, now you get an RFQ back; that goes back into your cost of building materials. That’s the best time in my mind to do it, is to put it back in that cost of building materials. Develop any amortizations or items like that for tooling. And then, now, you’re well on the way to using that quote for whatever you need. And the other thing too, I would suggest, is make sure you keep careful of where you put files. We have one vendor that faxes us back quotes. No problem. So I get it in my email (it comes to our fax but it gets sent to my email); and they’ve sent it me. I file it on the hard disk, and I save it in Outlook. But, what I put on the network, under that project I’ve got a directory called “Quotes” for that project. Then that way if I ever need to go find it, then I can, because I know where it is; it’s in that directory for that project. Because what’ll happen is a year from now I may need that quote again, and if its buried in some Outlook archive, good luck. So, instead, if I can go right to it and give it a final name that means something; save it on the network drive and I can go back and find those. And that becomes more important as you get a lot of projects going at once. Another thing, too, is sometimes you may not need that quote for a year. So you want to make sure that you’ve got that on hand; you know, the project gets delayed or you need to make more of them or what have you.

So, as you receive this documentation back, make sure that you’re putting that documentation in a safe place, you know, you’re storing that in your project directories. And the same thing, too – every time that we send out files, then that file is at a fixed rev level. So, if we make changes to that file, then the next time we send it out we send out a revised file that includes a change to the revision. If you don’t do that, it will bite you. It’s not fair to a vendor to say “Oh, this is the new version; don’t use the old one”. Go ahead, change the revision number, go through those steps; hand that to the vendor, show that on the P.O. That way, you’re less likely to get an old part or an old version of your design back. And that’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

I hope this has been helpful. This is one of those things that you want to have a consistent method of doing this so you can teach it to your staff, interns, what have you. And that’ll help you, too, as you have a good solid documentation process. It’ll help you over time as you need to go back and find those numbers, for whatever reason. And you will. Especially in a manufacturing environment. So, the more organized that is, the better off everybody is.

I hope this has been beneficial. It’s great to spend time together. And I hope that you have a great week. Montie Roland. Montie@montie.com is my email ((M-O-N-T-I-E at M-O-N-T-I-E dot com) You can give me a call – 1-800-722-7987 – or visit our website – www.montie.com. I hope you have a great week. Montie Roland, signing off.

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Podcast: How To Organize Your Project

One thing you can do that will help your team immensely is to organize your design files and related documentation.  This one thing will help reduce your stress level immensely, especially when you have to go back and look at those files after you haven’t worked on the project for a while.  Thanks for letting me share my experiences and thoughts with you.

How To Organize Your Project

Cheers,
Montie Roland
President
Montie Design

———– Transcript —————————————

Audio File: 2014 Feb 26 – How to Organize Your Project.mp3

 

Good morning. My name is Montie Roland. I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina.

And this morning what I’d like to talk about is how to structure your project from a file standpoint, from an organizational standpoint.

Montie Design is a full-service design firm in Morrisville, North Carolina. We provide industrial design, mechanical engineering and prototyping capability on-demand to help you move your project from concept to ready-for-the-shipping dock.

It’s always good to have processes and procedures. And, of course, any company can take that too far. And the counterpoint is if you take it too far, then you get that big company mentality and you’re painful to deal with. But, a lot of these processes and procedures benefit the company. And I’ll be the first to admit that as we’ve grown . . . I’ve not been the biggest proponent of procedure and process, because as a small group, you get everybody reading your mind and you don’t have to worry about it. But this changes as you have more employees, because of different levels of capabilities. You have to keep retraining. And so all of a sudden, it’s more important to have policies and procedures just to make life easier for your staff.

It’s also important when you think about interns. You got somebody that’s going to be there for a limited amount of time – you want to get them in, get them trained and get them some experience, and then also get some work product completed so it’s a win-win for both the employer and for the intern.

So let’s just dive in. A lot of these topics I’ve covered in past podcasts were much more higher level. And so, in this case though I want to dive in and let’s talk about this in detail. So, first thing is that, when you think about how do you organize your files, you want to have a place that everybody can get to. So, let’s say, let’s call it the \Z drive. And on the \Z drive, you have a space that is a shared working space. Now, what you need is you need a set of rules so everybody knows what to do. On a project where there’s more than one contributor, you really want to have a gatekeeper. So the gatekeeper is in charge of files that go in certain locations. One is that files that go in current design and the other is files that go in your release directories.

So, let’s kind of roll through those directories so I don’t get too far ahead of myself. The current design . . . well, back up. So, we’ve got a project directory, and let’s say our project is Zigzis (spell that one). And so I’ve created a directory, in this case; maybe for the client of Zigzis. And then I have to make decision. Is it likely I’m going to have multiple projects from this client? Or is it likely that I might just have one? Or that not now. So maybe what I’ll do is that I’m thinking that this might be a repeat client. So let’s say that, if it is, then I’m going to want to have a directory for each project that we do for that client. So, we’ve got a directory called “Clients” and then the client name; and then underneath that, let’s say Project A is the vertical inductor. So we create a directory called “Vertical Inductor”. Alright. And under Vertical Inductor, we’ve got several directories. And what we try to do is keep these file names the same so that its consistent for everybody. Otherwise, you run the risk of people not knowing where the correct file is, which could be really, really bad. Because if you don’t maintain control over where files are placed, then you end up with names like “12 February 04”; “13 February 04”; “29 November”, or “Latest”; “Latest Old”; “Latest New”. So you can imagine that someone stepping who isn’t the person that created those directories is not going to have a clue which is the correct set of files. Same thing for the person who created them; comes back six months’ later, may go, Ahh, I don’t know. And the scary part is you might grab the wrong files. Let’s say you grab the wrong files and made some parts. You just made some scrap metal, potentially. Or worse than that, it may take you a while to figure out what’s scrap metal and what’s not, and that may be more expensive than just doing the whole thing again. So, in order to avoid that entanglement, what we do is to have a directory called “Current Design”. Current Design is the working directory. After the project’s over, the files in Current Design, theoretically, should be the latest, but may or may not. But while the project’s active, Current Design should always have the up-to-date files. And that’s not necessarily released but that’s the current working files (and by “working files” means the ones you’re working on). Maybe if you just released and maybe those are the latest, same as the released, but if you’re between releases and your Current Design is the directory that you’re using to pull files out of.

Now, once you get a lot of hands working on a project, it’s always good to have a gatekeeper. And the gatekeeper is the person who controls what goes in Current Design. So, he may have ten people providing files to him, and then he turns around and puts them in Current Design. We also have a directory called “Released”. Released contains files that have been released. And what released means is its gone out to the vendor. Because most of the time we’re operating in a development mode, our release policies may be a little different than your release policies in a large manufacturing facility, or in any manufacturing facility. Because what we do is every time a drawing goes out to a vendor, we bump up the rev. In absence of a specific revision policy, what we do is we go up by numbers. So, we’ve got a part number and then the revision starts at 00, goes to 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 – so we can have a release at 07, a release at 12, a release at 99; don’t care. So one of the things is I think it’s important to keep in mind is that your revision number structure is something that someone eventually picks. And as long as it works for you, it just doesn’t matter. It just needs to be consistent. You can do A.1, A.2; we’ve seen that. You could do a major release is A; a minor release is numerical. So, it could be A.01, or A01. Or we just think it’s easier just to – 01, 02, 03, 04.

Now, whenever we release a drawing to a vendor or send it out to someone who may use that to make a part, then if we make changes to that drawing, we revise that drawing. If the change is very, very small, i.e., does not affect the final result that you get back, then maybe it’s not Rev’d at that point. So, for example, if you add a coma to a note that cannot possibly affect the outcome of the part, it’s just to fix some grammar, then maybe you don’t release that if you’re in the middle of development. At the end of a project, everybody has drawings; sure, you’ll need to Rev that.

So, the release directory – so we’ve got a directory called Released under our Induction Directory. And so then underneath that we’ll have “Rev (R-E-V) 01”. And so that’s our first release when we first send out drawings to someone, or to the client; call it “Rev_01”. The next time we have a release, we call it “Rev 02”. It’s important to note that part numbers and assembly drawn numbers may not necessarily align with this Rev 02 – Rev 03; it just means it’s the next time we released a set of drawings. Now, it may, depending on the client’s needs, there’s a possibility that we may Rev the top level assembly to match that revision in the directory. It kind of depends on where we are in the development process. But that way you always know that here is the latest and greatest that we’ve sent out. The Release directory also gives you a historical reference for what you’re working on. So that way you can go back and look at earlier versions of files if you need to. Hopefully, you never need to. But if you had a corrupted set of files, or something along those lines, you could. We also create “Concept” directories. And the Concept directories will have sub-directories underneath indicating which part of the project; so maybe if you did sketches for the rear mount, or the fascia, they might have separate directories. Usually we name concept sketches by date, which seems to work well, but that’s up to you. So usually what we’ll do is we’ll do “2014 Feb 24 – [and then the name of the concept] – so “2014 Feb 24 – Rounded Fascia Concept.PDF” or what have you.

The Concept directory is where you’ll store your sketches, your ideations; maybe your solid model concepts; pictures for your style board. So then, when you think about these files we’re starting to store, you really have two types of files: one type of file is parametric, and the other type of file is static; and then really, I guess a third file would be like a file that’s directly editable. So, when it comes to CAD files, though, we have two types. So, parametric files are files that are linked or potentially linked to other files. This is very, very important to keep in mind. So with SolidWorks, we can save a non-parametric file to a format like STEP or DXF or IGES or DWG or PDF. These non-parametric files can be edited – easily in the case of a DXF or DWG; less easily in the case of a PDF – and so these files, though, are generally not going to change . . . well, just because you change something somewhere else in the SolidWorks model. However, the SolidWorks file from SolidWorks are parametrically linked in many cases. So, for example, a drawing file is going to go reference the part file to rebuild the drawing. So, if the part file is missing, it can’t reference it and can’t rebuild the drawing, and you get basically a blank screen in the middle of your drawing. So this is very, very important to keep in mind. Whenever you move files from one directory to the other – and occasionally you need to do this anyway – you run the risk of orphaning a file that’s somewhere else. So, a good example of this is, let’s say that I am working on (in SolidWorks) and I go to McMaster Carr and I download a screw, which is a great way to get a screw. So, I download that screw and then I open it up; it comes across as a STEP or an IGES; and then I import it into my model. And when I hit Save, that McMaster Carr screw was saved to my download directory on my local machine. So, if I don’t consciously save that to my Current Design directory on the \Z drive, then what’s going to happen is that now I have files in two different places. So, if I was to go and grab Current Design and move it into Released, let’s say – just copy it over – I would leave that screw behind. Because the copy tool in Windows Explorer does not know about the relationships in SolidWorks, so it doesn’t know to go grab that. SolidWorks has this wonderful utility called Pack and Go. Pack and Go finds every file that’s linked to the files that you have open. So, what you want to do is go to the top level, of, let’s say, Drawing; or top level assembly. Open up Pack and Go, and it’ll give you some options. And generally, you want to exercise all those options in terms of including drawings, including textures, including decals, FEA results – grabbing all that’s good. That way you don’t leave something behind. SolidWorks will go look for those files, make a list of them, let’s you see that list, and then you pick a location where you either want to save that as a ZIP file, or you want to save that just to that directory; drop the files in that directory. So, you choose that directory and then you hit “okay”. Then SolidWorks will sync, and then it will start grabbing files and copying them to that directory. If you do not do this it will bite you. It is not a question of if it will bit; it’s a question of what moment, what day and how bad. Because we’ve seen this before. You can imagine that if you have files on a local machine and you just copy them over, or you copy them between places on the \Z drive or what have you, and you orphan some of these files, it can be very painful to find those, get those back. And then you’re never really sure you have the right one. So, let’s say you orphan a single screw. Okay, worse case, you can download it from McMaster again. But let’s say that you have somehow ended up with a part file that’s in an unknown Rev (or even if we know what the Rev should be), and maybe it’s in some directory. It could very easily happen that you inadvertently saved it to the wrong directory. So maybe you’re working in Current Design but you’re using a file from Rev 02; but that file is actually Rev 07. So you grab the stuff out of current design and move it to Rev 08; you miss the Rev 07 file. Well, now, all of a sudden, we’ve got no clue where to find that file. And it’s difficult to find without pulling up every single file in the subdirectory on the \Z drive and on your machine and try to figure out which one it is. And even then we’ve got to go by the revision number and properties, and that’s just painful because that still doesn’t tell us it’s the right one because there could be like a 7 here and a 07 here, and which one’s the correct one? If you do Pack and Go, you avoid soooo much of that trouble. Pack and Go is your friend. I just . . . this is one of those things that’s important to emphasize.

So, a similar thing applies to other programs. For example, PowerPoint has a Pack and Go feature; use it. Grab all of these images, put them in a Pack and Go file, because most of the time when you’re working on projects you end up with images in different subdirectories; it’s on a local machine; it’s on your network. But if you do Pack and Go it grabs all those and puts them in the same space. Yes, you use more disk space. I will argue that disk space is dirt cheap compared to a few hours of looking for a file you can’t find ten minutes before your deadline.

The same goes for, you know, when you’re working in any of the Adobe products. If you have the option to embed it in the file rather than link to it, embed it in the file. I realize this can make your catalog a gigabyte in size. But, it’s so much better than two months later pulling it up and missing files. There again, disk space is cheap; time’s not. So, embed those files, Pack and Go . . . you know, use these features in these programs so that it makes it easier.

Alright, so, it’s also important to note that you have a PLM system, and you do check-ins and check-outs. It’s going to be a little different because that software’s going to manage a lot of what we’re talking about. So, I’m not sure; I think it’s beyond the scope of this podcast to go in-depth on the PLM systems. And they’re great; they’re awesome. They help manage some of this. So, in this case, we’re just talking about the manual. But, on the other hand, if you understand the manual, it makes it a lot easier to understand the PLM.

So, we’ve talked about our Current Design, Released. Let’s go back to Released for a second and talk about reving assemblies or not to Rev assemblies. It’s going to be driven by several things. One is if your design changed dramatically and the assembly doesn’t look like the parts, you need to Rev the assembly. Other times you may need to Rev the assembly is if you have a vendor that has a PLM system that is tied to the assembly rev, and doesn’t have the flexibility to make a change to their drawing set without a revised assembly. We’ve seen that. We have a project right now we’re working on; they don’t have that control. So if we make changes, we have to revise the assembly, just because we revised a part. And the problem is that if you have to do that there may be a lot of subassemblies in-between, so it’s definitely a lot of work to do that. And so you’re kind of starting to see, as a manager now, why sometimes your engineers are reticent to do revisions, because there is some work to it.

So other directories that you’ll need, one is I create a “Project Management” directory. Project Management directory has contracts; has any schedules; things that you need in managing the project, but maybe not necessarily need to execute the design. So another thing we would do is that we want to create a Bill of Materials. The Bill of Materials is soooo handy. As the project goes along, your Bill of Materials is going to become a costed Bill of Materials. So at the end of the project what we want to see is we want to see a Bill of Materials that has a part number, a description, a revision, and has costing information. Now, depending on the project, there may be some projects where that’s completely handled by the client. For a MontieGear project, one of the last steps is to make sure that Bill of Materials is correct, has the costing information, and then, that is used by the person doing the pricing, which often is me for MontieGear. I will take that, and if that Bill of Materials is done correctly, what I can then do is add the cost of labor to do assembly; any shipping costs; and then I know how to price the product without going through and pulling up a bunch of drawings. And this is so important later on. It saves tremendous amount of time.

So as you go through the project, other directories you’re going to want to have is “Quotes”. So, anytime a quote comes in, scan it in. If its electronic, save it. Create a directory of your quotes from your vendors in one spot. So, that’s a subdirectory under your project directory. You’ve got Quotes. So we’ve done Current Design, Concepts, Quotes. Another one you’ll often have is something called “Files from Client”. And so those are files that the client has provided. These are documentation that where they’ve given you pre-project documentation; there may be initial version of a product specification. And so this is that repository of those documents. There again, a lot of times we’ll save those file names by date; if it’s a quote, we’ll save it by date and vendor, name, and then possibly, you know, what that is if it’s a single part quote. So you can quickly scan down that directory and find the quote for the lower left beam, or what have you.

And you may have other directories as needed. Those will depend with projects. One of the other things we do is create an “Images” directory; underneath it we’ll have a description of general what that image is about. So, it might be \images\first prototype; or date first prototype; date proof of concept; date alpha prototype; date beta prototype; date installation. So, that way you can scroll through there and very quickly find those images. It’s also a great place if you’re a manufacturer to also put your product shots, or your products in use; maybe they’re static images done is the light tent. But that way you’ve got a great way to go find that, because its tied to the project. So this project directly, theoretically, if you were to just copy that to a flash drive, it would have everything you need to continue with that project. And that’s good because over time hard drives change; files get deleted; directories get changed. But so if you encapsulate everything in that subdirectory, then that makes life a lot easier.

So, kind of to roll back through this, we’ve parametric files and we’ve got non-parametric files; and then we’ve got files that are often edited. And so, the parametric files are SolidWorks files that could be Inventor or it could be Pro-E. But those are files that need to be kept together; need to be moved using a Pack and Go. And occasionally with your current design, one way to make sure you have the correct files in there is to Pack and Go to a temporary directory; delete the files in Current Design, and then copy those back in. And that way you know you don’t have some superfluous files in there.

Other files that we’ll create and need to do something with are non-parametric files. So, these could be IGES, STEP, DXF, DWG. And these files, in the Release directory, it will have the parametric files – plus – a PDF of each drawing, and maybe a DXF or DWG as that’s needed to do a cutting process, a 2-D cutting process like water jet; or sometimes a machine shop, if they’re working from a 2-D file. Also have the 3-D non-parametric files, like STEP or IGES. And so that way, in that Release directory, you’ve got the CAD files, plus you’ve got the files you’re going to send out to vendors (the non-parametric files). Then probably this would be a good spot for your Bill of Materials for that rev. And so in this case a lot of these files follow the same format (for us, at least): it’s part number, space, dash, space, description, underscore, Rev (R-E-V-), space, and then the two-digit revision code (so, 00 or 02). And so we do this to keep these file names consistent so they’re easy to read through quickly. And that way you can very quickly figure out what you’re looking for. If you don’t maintain control over file names, you end up with file names that mean something to one person today; but may mean nothing to someone later. And, six months from now, may not mean anything to the person who named it then. So, I think it’s very important to maintain that control; have a strict doctrine over that.

That Bill of Materials, it’s important for costing purposes if you’re a manufacturer because that way your engineer is taking what they’ve learned when they went out for quotes (or the purchasing agent), so whoever went out for those quotes enters that into your Bill of Material so now you can do your pricing quickly without having to go look for a bunch of information which may be hard to find. Also, storing those quotes is valuable because then you’ve got a way to address that quickly, there again, without having to go look through emails or look wherever.

So, from a hundred-thousand foot view, what we want to do is we want this project directory to provide everything you need to pick up that project, modify that project, price that product, or deliver to a client. And if you can do that, then that helps multiple phases of the organization; not just engineering or industrial design, but also purchasing; it’s great for a reference later for sales and marketing because they understand what’s driving the cost. And it’s just a win-win all the way around. And that’s important, there again, to maintain that discipline because it’s not only helping in the engineering stage, like I said, you’ll reap benefits for the life of the product, especially if you ever have to go back and make a change or you ever have to go back and re-price or pricing on components. It’s a great tool. And having that in a standard format, it just benefits you.

If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to give me a call. I know it was kind of a long section here and technical, but happy to entertain your calls, questions. It’s 1-800-722-7987. It’s Montie Roland. Email – montie@montie.com (M-O-N-T-I-E at M-O-N-T-I-E dot com). Or you can visit our website – www.montie.com. You can see the results of client work we’ve done at the montie.com website, or you can see some of our project that we’ve done for ourselves at MontieGear – M-O-N-T-I-E-G-E-A-R dot com). I hope this has been beneficial. Montie Roland, signing out.

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