Hiring the Right Rapid Prototyping Services Provider for Your Product Development

As a design engineer, there’s a growing pressure on you to come up with a new product idea that can help your company to compete better in the market. You have gathered all the information and prepared a design on time. Now, your job is to figure out how to push this design to production quickly, so that it can reach the market faster. In tight deadlines, where the release date is already finalized, you still have a lot to do.

Right from validating the design to selecting the materials and manufacturing techniques, you’ll need prototyping processes before committing production resources. And to do this efficiently, you might need to partner with the right company that can handle your prototyping requirements.

Choosing the Right Company for Your Prototyping Needs

Your prime requirement would be to work with a design support services provider who understands your requirements better, guides you through the prototyping process, manages your important data securely, provides inputs in the design improvement and also helps you with the production process. In other words, you would need a full-service company that can solve your challenges rather than adding more.

Here are few important points you should consider when choosing the right one:

1. Relevant to Your Industry

Ideally, you should look for a company that has enough experience and knowledge about things that are related to your industry and the product. Right from knowing the benefits and limitations of materials familiarity with the machines to speaking the same industry lingo, the characteristics like these in the company can support you through the prototyping process. It also becomes easier for you to communicate downstream with the vendors involved in the manufacturing step.

2. Prototyping Capabilities

The company that you choose should ideally have all the prototyping capabilities, especially if your product involves complex assemblies that require multiple prototyping methods such as 3D printing, CNC machining or injection molding. This is required if you don’t want to spend days or weeks waiting for the prototyping company who would have apparently sourced every part of the prototype to different places and then assembled these parts to send it to you. It is even difficult and time-consuming for you to do the same task of assembling parts received from multiple companies.

As such, a single company that can handle all your requirements is essential to avoid such problems and allows you to make changes quickly. Moreover, working with a single company also ensures that your IP is secure, rather than spread over several companies.

3. Prototyping Technologies

Look for a company that is constantly updating itself with the rapidly changing technology, so that they have the required capabilities in terms of hardware and materials to handle complex design requirements easily and quickly. Although, if your prototype may not require the use of advanced technologies, a company that is well aware of the trends will possess the knowledge to help improve your product design and can support in your product development process more strategically.

4. Provision for Change Management

A product design is bound to undergo many changes before it is finalized. The company you hire should accept this fact and must have the provision to allow changes in the design in real time. This is essential to keep the process of prototyping moving ahead quickly.

Facility for Low Volume Production

There may be instances when you run into a situation where your manufacturing setup isn’t ready due to tight product launch dates. You may even require a low-volume production to meet the temporary requirements, for which your existing manufacturing setup might not be cost-effective. This is where you can benefit by working with a prototyping firm that can help you with low-volume production.

Working with a Comprehensive Prototyping Solutions Provider

Sitting back and watching your competitors winning isn’t what you need. What you need is to quickly validate your design ideas and push them to manufacturing faster, so that it reaches the market sooner than your competition. Partner with us at Hitech – a leading engineering design support service provider to meet your prototyping and manufacturing requirements.

Hitech Engineering Services assist you right from transforming your concepts to 3D CAD models and drawings to rapid prototyping and virtual testing your product design, so that you can confidently manufacture and get your innovative product to market at the right time.

About Author :

Kashyap Vyas is an Engineer at Hitech and holds a Master’s degree in Thermal Engineering with several research papers to his credit. He covers CAD and CAE topics for the engineering industry. His contributions are primarily focused on encouraging manufacturers and suppliers to adopt virtual product development tools to build efficient products with reduced time-to-market.