Here’s the scenario: you have an idea for a new product. You’ve done your market research, you have a good sense for your product category and use case, and you’ve even looked into and budgeted for the costs associated with bringing your product to market.
But one of the biggest challenges your team has yet to face (possibly without recognizing the need for doing so) involves working out the details of how your product needs to operate and perform. In other words, while you have a clear sense of what your product needs to do, you don’t yet have a clear sense of how it will do this.
Answering this question is crucial to creating profitable products and your company’s ROI. So crucial that it requires a partner with specialized experience in determining the minimum viable products to refine ambiguous requirements.
Though that may sound like a mouthful, it’s just a technical way of saying you need a partner who can help determine not only which materials, technologies, design approaches, and manufacturing methods are most viable for your use case but most optimal. Let’s explore three elements needed for achieving this goal.
An Integrative Approach
Optimizing product development to a particular use case involves understanding how all the different phases of the process influence each other and fit together. When you work with a one-source partner like Pivot International, you’re working with a company whose reputation and strength lie in integrating and optimizing every aspect of the product development process. With our nearly fifty years of expertise across fourteen industries and 320,000 square feet of manufacturing capability worldwide, we have the company-owned resources and proven track record to ensure your success.
The Power of DFM
DFM stands for Design For Manufacturing and is what sets Pivot apart. While all one-source product development firms include design, engineering, and manufacturing capability, Pivot is one of the very few with in-house DFM. (When DFM is outsourced to a separate company, the result is often less than seamless.)
DFM provides the missing link between design and manufacture. The importance of this cannot be overstated. This link ensures design is always undertaken with an eye toward scaleable (cost-effective) manufacturing.
Answering the question of how your product needs to operate and perform isn’t just a design challenge. It’s also an engineering, manufacturing, and larger supply chain challenge. Even though, on the surface, these different aspects may appear to be unrelated, this is simply not the case. From the very beginning, each aspect needs to be considered in the context of the whole product picture. This is the power of a one-source partner with in-house DFM.
Close Collaboration
Pivot is known for its highly collaborative approach. Our teams work closely with your company to understand your specific product vision, needs, and objectives. Once we’ve achieved clarity, we determine the viable materials, designs, technologies, and manufacturing methods needed to meet your product’s minimum requirements.
Using our nearly fifty years of experience, we then strategically distill the optimal from the merely viable. (Optimal from a functional perspective, an operational perspective, an end-user perspective, a cost-savings perspective, and much more.) After this is complete, we document and map various paths for moving forward — along with the tradeoffs between them. We then present this map to you, working together to determine which route you prefer for reaching the final destination.
If you have a product idea, we can help you translate it into a profitable reality. As our portfolio attests, we are behind many of the world’s most successful and award-winning products. We offer a wealth of solutions for almost any product and supply chain need. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you bring a successful product to market and grow your business, contact us today for a no-cost consultation.
