Factors That Affect Your Manufacturing Design

Manufacturing is a key factor that dictates the success of your product. The more you take manufacturing into account during each stage of the consumer electronics design process, the more time, money, and effort you will save. Most importantly, you will ensure the best output from manufacturing as possible.

In addition to forward-thinking design, there are tons of factors that come into play when you arrive at the manufacturing stage of your product development journey. Today, we will delve into a few of them.

MAKO designed the Festken bottle for mass manufacturing with quality and precision.

Complexity of the Product

When your consumer electronics design is too complex, you create a bottleneck in the assembly process, which can make it difficult for your manufacturer to meet deadlines. A product can be considered complex due to a ton of different variables, such as the number of PCB layers included or the routing and placement of components. When a design is too complex, it makes it challenging to maintain product quality without increasing the production time.

Reusability of the Design

When creating your consumer electronics design, it is important to take current established and burgeoning trends into account. Research should be conducted to ensure your design allows for future changes and upgrades without having to scrap the design completely and start from scratch (an obvious waste of time). By ensuring your design is future-proof, you’ll also have a higher return on investment!

MAKO created the PetBot for one of our clients through electronics engineering and intuitive industrial design that heavily incorporated manufacturing considerations, resulting in its widespread success.

Last-Minute Design Changes

It’s highly unlikely that you won’t need to make any critical design changes when developing your consumer electronics product. However, if you have to take care of these necessary modifications later in your design process, ensuring manufacturing timelines are met will be more difficult than needed.

These are only three of the many factors you should take into consideration during the consumer electronics design process. Following these strategies will ascertain that the manufacturing stage is as smooth and productive as possible.

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!