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Proto A series

In just over 5 months time we have managed to create a functional proto A series for one of our clients: an incredible achievement made possible due to diligent planning, hard work, parallel development processes, and close cooperation with our Malaysian department.

The latter proved particularly fruitful due to the difference in time zones: at the start of each day their day would come to an end, allowing for a few hours of overlap for deliberation. At the end of our day, we could bounce information their way again and they could continue where we left off. This sort of international joint-cooperative development is quite a powerful tool once you’ve got it up-and-running, though as I experienced it requires a lot of communication, management, and quality assurance to keep it on track.

The project has been quite challenging overall: not only regarding lead time, but also regarding tolerance control (some parts required tolerance control within several µm), analytical performance (constant thermal management within several degrees), and X-ray safety constraints (scatter, material choice, and production process control). Of course, this is on top of the general constraints one has to deal with when developing industrial products (low series and thus relatively high tooling costs, short component life cycle versus engineering costs of a redesign, etc), as this is a completely different league compared to consumer products.

Hopefully I will be able to share more detailed information once the product has launched, up until that time I’ll have to cloak my excitement with vagueness. 😛

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