Four Ways to Match Production To Demand and How New Product Development Services Can Help
Your production process is one of the most strategic decisions your business will make. The process by which you fulfill customer orders is the difference between strong margins and a backlog that you’re under-resourced to produce.
However, you can rely on engineering support to help you find efficiencies in your model. A new product development consulting team can work alongside your team to make your approach more effective or find a new approach that better suits your goals.
What follows are the most common production models and how finding a strong outside engineering firm can improve them.
Engineer-to-Order (ETO)
This method is the most customized of any manufacturing approach. Each product is designed and built for a single customer. This approach also always requires engineering support. Your products are designed or redesigned for a specific customer’s requirements.
ETO’s challenge is that it has the longest lead times and the highest engineering investment. The strain that this model puts on your engineering team can make or break this model.
How the New Product Development Team Can Help With ETO
New product development services offer design support, so that internal engineering teams have the help they need when new orders come in. A strong team that is deeply experienced in product development can complete the entire process for your business.
Make-to-Order (MTO)
Much like the engineer-to-order approach, nothing in the MTO gets built until an order is placed. You get to manufacture a proven product to certain specifications, as opposed to designing something new.
Engineering Help For MTO
Outside engineers can assist with designing made-to-order products effectively. These teams are particularly helpful if you don’t have an internal engineering department. Look for an outsourced engineering team with a comprehensive new product development process that they follow meticulously, so you can deliver an exceptional product to your customers. Excellent engineers can validate a product design thoroughly, allowing your team to build with assurance about performance quality.
Build-to-Stock (BTS)
In this model, your business forecasts demand, manufactures finished goods, and holds them in inventory until an order arrives. Consumer products, components, or standard off-the-shelf equipment are often built with this approach.
BTS Can Benefit From New Product Development
Getting a standard design right is important, as you don’t want to replicate a design flaw for all the products in a run. Hiring a new product development team can help optimize the design to ensure that it is thoroughly validated for durability. With an outsourced engineering team’s help you can avoid field failure and the costly risks associated with it.
Assemble-to-Order (ATO)
ATO is an approach in which you stock standardized components and assemble them for a finished product once an order comes in. This is helpful for customers who want larger customization options on a piece of equipment without having to engineer from scratch. If your inventory is made up of components that can be quickly combined, ATO is a strong fit.
The New Product Development Process For ATO
Outside engineers can provide significant support for manufacturers using this model. They can analyze your order history to find the patterns that repeat across custom jobs, then design a component library with information on how parts can be combined in various ways. In-house teams typically can’t spend their time on this kind of undertaking because of other priorities, but an outside team can.
A New Product Development Team Is a Strategic Advantage
Whichever model (or models) you use today, effective outside engineering support helps you serve customers better. You may even begin to adopt new production workflows knowing that consulting help exists to support them.
Your engineers are already committed elsewhere, so relying on new product development consultants for support allows you to augment your team and resolve bottlenecks without hiring internally. With their help, you have instant access to expertise, a team that can manage itself, and consistent support for each new challenge that comes your way.
Outside engineers exist to see your challenge with a new set of eyes. They step back, see your processes from the outside, find opportunities, and build solutions that help your business move into a new stage of growth.
Learn more about product development resources by exploring these articles:
“How New Product Development Is Meeting the Future of Manufacturing”“What Exceptional Product Design Engineers Do Differently”“5 Signs You’ve Found an Ideal Outsourced Engineering Team”
