Virtual Product Development? Today, Why Not?
You've got an idea for a new product that you feel will catch on. You make some sketches. They look pretty good. But you don't have (or really want) the resources to design, make, inventory and sell the product. What do you do? Forget about it? No, you make it "virtually." Here's how.
Tucker Marion and Marvin Weinberger launched the Innovation Factory with the goal of creating interesting, highly functional consumer products. Note the emphasis on "creating" products, not "making" them—for central to their mission was that Innovation remain a "virtual" corporation, outsourcing and collaborating on design, tool making, plastic injection molding, product assembly, packaging, inventory and shipping.
Their first project sprang from the shared aggravation of scraping ice and snow off their car windows after a mid-winter evening business meeting. It occurred to them that here was an obvious problem looking for a solution: Why hadn't anyone come up with an in ice scraper that actually worked—one that was ergonomic, light weight and functionally designed to work on curved surfaces of today's automotive front and rear windshields. Which got Marion thinking about, and sketching, what would eventually become the IceDozer.
Marion believed that creating a virtual team—pulling experts together regardless of location—during all phases of the product development cycle would not only get the job done, but get it done quickly and efficiently. In a first step, he turned to EJM Design (North Hollywood, CA), an accomplished industrial design firm with a string of successful commercial product collaborations (Teledyne's Waterpik and Thermoscan, for example) to translate the initial scraper concept into several possibilities.
Design/Manufacturing considerations
The initial design criteria were simple: The IceDozer's blade had to conform to all shapes of automotive window design; its shape had to maximize the ergonomics at play in actual physical scraping movements required in ice and snow removal; and the scraper had to be strong, able to take serious use and/or abuse and last a long time.
"EJM came up with 17 concepts for the IceDozer," Marion says. "We selected the one that most closely resembled our initial design, and then created wooden models and finally 2-D scaled drawings. We conferred several times on additional design refinements and were then ready for some real-world manufacturing input."
Innovation next went to the DVIRC (Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center), an economic development organization that helps improve the competitiveness of small- to medium-sized manufacturers throughout Pennsylvania. Adhering to established design-for-manufacturability principles, the DVIRC team, in virtual conjunction with EJM and Innovation, was very quickly able to reduce the number of injection-molded parts in the IceDozer from 10 to three, resulting in a considerable reduction in unit cost per scraper. One team member, a machinist by trade, drew the cost down even further: He calculated that each pull in the molding process added 33% to the cost of the tooling; each pull eliminated saved approximately $5,000.
After several additional CAD iterations, rapid prototyping, the creation of an RTV mold and subsequent model, the team conducted rigorous—and successful—cold weather tests: The IceDozer now was ready to come to life.
Build, fulfillment & virtuality
All of the foregoing had been accomplished by employing conference calling and design sharing via the Internet and e-mail. Now, however, it was time to find and source the IceDozer to a manufacturer who would actually make the scraper.
Staying true to the virtual model, Innovation posted an RFQ on MFG.com to locate the right injection molding company. MFG.com is an interactive Web service enabling manufacturers to buy and sell custom manufacturing services. Buyers post RFQs at no cost; suppliers quote for business that meets their expertise and capacity.
"We had ten to 15 manufacturers nationwide respond to our RFQ with varying quotes and a wide range of prices," says Marion. "Based on timing and cost, we settled on VMV Tool & Engineering (Madison, IN), a well respected tool and die maker and molder whose focus is in manufacturing aluminum tools at low- to medium-volumes—50 to 50,000 parts. Time-to-market for us was absolutely critical in our first year, so delivery was a very, very important issue. We had some suppliers quoting delivery as far out as 24 weeks. VMV guaranteed eight weeks."
VMV not only was the right source from a cost and delivery perspective, but they also perfectly fit the "virtual" mold. In addition to the right shop capacity, VMV had an extra 10,000 sq ft of space normally used for secondary operations, assembly, packaging, inventory and shipping. A differentiator that would have been nearly impossible to match using traditional sourcing tools.
"This was perfect," Marion says. "Not only did we locate a great supplier, but for little cost we parlayed tool making into injection molding, assembly, warehousing and order fulfillment."
Marion says that by using MFG.com they were able to select toolmakers with the capability to eliminate middlemen from the supply chain. Which has allowed Innovation Factory to remain "virtual."
"We do all the initial design work, but everything else is outsourced. All incoming orders—from the Internet, from QVC, from catalogues, from Amazon.com—everything is centrally filled right where it's manufactured. We've a very short, fast, efficient, and most important easily managed, supply chain."
Which has allowed Marion and Weinberger to begin planning and sketching a full line of IceDozer products, including a small glove box version as well as a larger, beefier model for big vehicles such as vans, SUVs and trucks.
The verdict on going virtual
"Being able to put our designs out on the Internet and select suppliers from those who meet out criteria has been pivotal to the virtual process central to our mission. Is it working? We've grown 1000 percent from the winter of 2001/2002 to the winter of 2002/2003. Yes, I'd says it works," Marion says.
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