Bringing a new product to market – how to engage a design and manufacturing partner

In the second in a series of blog posts looking at how to bring a new product to market, Teddington MD James Henderson explores how to engage with the right design and manufacturing partners.

In the last post I looked at the importance of finding partners you could trust and how important it is that everyone brings something tangible to the table.

But once you’ve identified a partner – how do you engage with them? The process should start much earlier than when you pick up the phone.

Let’s start with a bit of myth busting. There seems to be a persistent belief that a neat triangle exists between ‘time’, "quality’ and ‘cost’ and that you can move freely around inside this triangle. This helps facilitate conversations like: “if we spend more, then quality increases, time decreases or both”.

Now this could, hypothetically, be true. But here is my issue with that statement. I have yet to meet any development in which all three of these parameters are actually variable. There is always one (and in most cases two) that are in fact fixed. There’s no trade off to be made.

Many people simply don't think about this carefully enough up front. This is not pointing any fingers, just a statement of what we see all too regularly here at Teddington.

As a result, many clients don’t really understand their constraints early enough in the development cycle.

It’s therefore vital to spend a bit of time on the requirements stage. Test what the constraints on the project are before anything is designed.

Find out which parameters are fixed and at what level; best not to find out when the development is 50% complete and the solution is complicated, expensive and slow.

Don’t kid yourself on day one and hope it disappears. Face up to the limits and work towards engineering a solution with both eyes open.

Only when you fully understand this yourself can you communicate this effectively to a potential partner.

James 

Read the next blog in this series - find the experts who can help or read the previous post entitled the importance of choosing the right design and manufacturing partners.