By Wayne Miller and Michael Keer

Reduce Risk and Prepare for the Unexpected

In today’s global economy, supply chain disruptions are inevitable. Companies must proactively plan for resilience and adaptability, whether due to geopolitical tensions, tariffs, component shortages, or factory challenges.

Product Realization Group’s veteran hardware and operations experts Michael Keer, Founder and Managing Partner, and Wayne Miller, New Product Development and Introduction, shared their insights on mitigating supply chain risk, drawing from decades of experience in manufacturing, operations, and supplier management. Below, we outline seven key strategies to safeguard your supply chain and keep your production on track.

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By Mike Freier

The Journey to Volume Manufacturing and Beyond: Scaling Your Hardware-based Product

In the span of our idea-to-scale series, we’ve navigated through the various phases of transforming a hardware-based product idea into a market-ready product. We’ve explored the crucial stages of design, planning, development, as well as controlled introduction. Now, we arrive at the pivotal point of Volume Manufacturing, where we will learn how it can be leveraged to increase efficiency, improve quality and lower costs to effectively scale your business. 

In this final segment, we turn our focus to scaling a resilient supply chain and revisiting key concepts from earlier segments. These include Contract Manufacturer (CM) selection, tooling and fixturing, communication, and business systems. We’ll also include additional insights into production forecasting, test, and logistics and repair, with a focus on quality, delivery and cost-effectiveness.

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By Mike Freier

In the last blog, we discussed the importance of business systems including the perils of manual processes, common business systems used for an agile hardware product lifecycle, optimizing data flows, managing product data across systems, and tips for success. 

Now, in this final blog in the controlled Introduction series, we discuss the importance of customer trials, identifying and developing trial customers, running the trials and how to leverage the learnings resulting from these trials to benefit your business.

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By Mike Freier

In the last blog, we discussed how to navigate the various mechanical tooling options and the advantages and trade-offs for volume production. We learned that considering factors such as lead times, cost, quality, and control over development processes is essential to selecting the most appropriate tooling option tailored to your specific product requirements.

Now, let’s continue to our next blog series, which will focus on business systems. Business systems are critical for supporting agile product realization, optimizing your processes, meeting regulatory compliance, and scaling your business. So let’s explore business systems strategies, flows, usage throughout the product life cycle, and tips for success.

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Article by Mike Freier

In our last blog post, we delved into the journey of transitioning from engineering and beta units to high-volume production. We explored the crucial steps of choosing a reliable contract manufacturer (CM), negotiating a mutually beneficial agreement, and providing comprehensive documentation to support the product assembly process.

Now, let’s dive into our next blog piece, where we’ll uncover the world of mechanical tooling options that will support your product’s successful development and scale-up into high-volume production. We’ll be exploring 3D printing, soft tooling, and hard tooling, each offering unique advantages and trade-offs. By understanding these differences, you’ll be empowered to make better informed decisions and select the best strategy to support your business.

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