Get to Market Faster
In today’s increasingly competitive industry, getting to market fast is no longer an option—it’s imperative. There are four ways we help customers get to market faster:
When it comes to developing your project, we know what to look for, what needs to be done, what questions to ask, and common pitfalls to avoid.
Our customers find that getting IMC involved early in the design stage promotes the manufacturability of the product; a more robust initial design is often the result. They also find that this collaborative approach is one of the best ways to improve engineering productivity and time-to-market because it avoids expensive, time-consuming downstream changes.
Whether it is a new product moving from concept to production, or an existing component or assembly in need of a design change, we’ll help you find ways to optimize the manufacturing process for time, cost and quality. We also understand that on-time delivery means not only delivering product on time, but also meeting all of our project management deadlines as well.
When a product is delayed due to an engineering mistake, the cost to the customer is more than just lost time or extra dollars spent to re-design and rebuild prototype; there is also a cost that often goes unaccounted for—the cost of a lost opportunity. IMC is founded on principles and systems to ensure that these types of critical delays are minimized.
The next time you feel the "need for speed," give us a call; we’ll help put your project on the fast track to completion.
Design For Manufacturing (DFM)
Our structured cost reduction process is an aggressive blend of three cost control strategies:
- Lean Manufacturing Systems
- Six-Sigma Quality Analysis Tools
- Total Productive Maintenance
Research shows that decisions made during the design phase of a project determine 70% of the cost of a new product. Even more importantly, decisions made in the first 5 % of product design could determine the vast majority of the product’s cost, quality and manufacturability. In other words, design-for-manufacturability (DFM) can have a dramatic effect on a product’s success and profitability. We have a unique ability to understand the functionality of the components we produce and translate this understanding into better ways of doing things.
IMC has invested heavily in DFM expertise, in-house tooling, and the ability to design and build our own equipment for rapid prototyping. As a result, we are uniquely qualified to help you:
- Reduce the number of parts in a design
- Design foolproof assemblies
- Verify products and processes
- Avoid unnecessarily tight tolerances
- Design robustness into products and processes
- Design for parts orientation, handling and ease of assembly
- Evaluate use of alternative materials
- Design modular products to facilitate assembly
Convert Metal Components to Plastic to save time, effort, and costs.
New Product Innovation (NPI)
We believe the best way to get to market fast is to eliminate all wasted effort in conception, design, and manufacturing of the product.
If engineering’s role in NPI stops when the product is handed off to manufacturing, the result is often poor design for manufacturability, increased design costs, and delayed time-to-market. Our process keeps engineering involved from design to production.
This approach enables us to provide you with valuable feedback on the manufacturability of a design, expensive changes, and to explore potential cost saving alternatives. It also allows you to leverage our experience from working with hundreds of other companies to identify hard-to-get parts, provide design input, and influence cost and trade-off decisions. We can work on a turn-key basis or provide custom services at a reasonable incremental price—your call.
At IMC, prototyping is not an afterthought. It is an opportunity to learn a great deal about the performance of a product before designs are finalized.
Before developing production tooling, our engineering group helps our customers answer initial questions such as: can a critical dimension be met within the desired tolerances, or if another material would yield better performance in the application. Prototype tests are also used to verifiy if design elements can be obtained prior to finalizing designs and commencing with production tooling builds. Analysis gained from prototype tools and samples can translate to more smooth and efficient development of the production steps.
For more information about what prototype options are available to you, click Prototype Information Sheet.
