Product Development
We offer turn key product development to help you take your seedling-idea from design through prototyping, short run pilot tests, production and in to the marketplace.
Having a dream product idea is fantastic. Working out how to run with that idea from paper sketch, through production and getting it market ready is a daunting prospect. We have many years of experience developing successful products and are therefore in a position to manage this process for you.
Scrum project management
Scrum is a project management tool that was designed to overcome the limitation of the waterfall approach, that is, trying to think of all specifications at the start of the project when one doesn’t really know the full requirements of the product that is being developed.
Scrum, on the other hand, uses an iterative approach to development. At the start of a project we help the client create a product backlog. This is a list of real-world, tangible features that the product must have. The backlog is then prioritized by the client in terms of business value that each feature brings them. During each two week development cycle (the sprint) the highest priority features are worked on. At the end of each sprint our goal is to have a working prototype which can demonstrate, in an unambiguous way, required functionality.
The agility in this system of project management is that it allows the client to add in new functionality as they learn about the product that they are developing, as well as the capability of the technology being used. This approach also allows more testing earlier on in the project which means fewer potential problems during manufacture and pilot production.
All this reduces time to market and product development costs while maximizing the value of the product.
Lean production methods
We base our manufacturing methodology on the Toyota Production System, a proven approach that optimizes efficiency by eliminating waste. We work hard at eliminating overproduction or storing products in buffer zones, while still meeting production requirements on time.
All of our day to day stock management is done using Kanban cards. Each production bay pull’s partially built assemblies from its neighbor and only allows parts to move down the production line after inspection and, where possible, a functionality check. This ensures that no component reaches the end of production only to fail final testing.
We started implementing Lean production almost a year ago and have increased our production quality to nearly 99% error free manufacturing. But 99% is not good enough. Increasing quality and reducing waste through lean methods is just one of our long term commitments.