You don’t want to give the green light for production without ensuring that all appropriate preparations have been done. Manufacturers’ project managers may be too busy or may lack the experience needed to review all the usual deliverables.
With this solution, our team steps in to review all the completed NPI (product development and pre-production) work for you to make sure that nothing is missed and can read documents in English or in the local language (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc) if needed.
Companies that are developing a new electrical and/or mechanical product need to make sure they have all their I’s dotted and T’s crossed.
If they or an engineering service provider or contract manufacturer they hired have been working on the New Product Introduction, missing something crucial could have a devastating effect on the project’s economics, and finding out about it before large investments are made is crucial.
In order to understand why this kind of review is necessary, let’s look at a few examples:
- If, for example, there is no clear quality standard, how will you tell the manufacturer when a batch of products that they’ve made is not acceptable? How do you avoid a long-drawn argument about that?
- If your mechanical CAD drawings don’t include tolerances, mention what dimensions are critical to quality, and spell our what the color, material, and finish are, do you expect the manufacturer to guess what the designer had in mind?
- If there is a chance your product fails in a way that puts a user’s health at risk, have you analyzed those potential failures carefully? Have you conducted reliability testing to assess how likely those failures are? Have you tested it in an appropriate way? And have you thought of what design/material changes are needed?
- Have you planned for pilot validation run(s) before manufacturing thousands of units? If not, the probability of quality issues and delays is quite high, and you might have to absorb them.
This review should be done when a relatively complex new product has been designed and developed, but before planning to move into mass production.
Ideally, it starts when final prototypes are being prepared, just before the product design gets frozen and tooling fabrication starts. It is typically ongoing through tooling fabrication & validation and through the pilot runs.
Note: If you intend to provide an information pack to a contract manufacturer (CM) for a final quote, all those deliverables should be well organized and should have been reviewed prior to sharing. If the CM gets confused, they will expect more work will fall on their plate to clear that confusion, and it may be reflected in their pricing. Show them your project is well prepared and fully mature before working together!
It is mainly a review of what has been done so far in the new product development work, to detect any missing steps or gaps that might derail the whole project.
We typically ask for information on the following topics:
- Understanding of the plan that was followed and steps taken
- Product design risk analyses and preventive systems
- Product design files readiness for MFG (CAD files, BOM…)
- Engineering change approvals, ECNs
- Product quality planning
- Acceptance methods & criteria
- Measurement system validation
- Component suppliers’ qualification
- Component specifications and test results
- Any known gaps to follow up on?
- Product reliability & durability: requirements, plan, tests
- Export packaging validation tests
- Plan for validations & verifications all the way through production
- Regulatory requirements, certifications, etc.
- Process risks, process controls, WIs for operators
- Pilot runs: plans, objectives, findings
- List of issues, countermeasures, follow up
If you can give us an organized “information pack”, for example in a SharePoint folder, we can review it in a go and provide you with structured feedback in 1 report.
In many cases, we get information from different sources over email at different times. In those cases, it is often better to respond by email.
If you need a structured report, we can follow a typical PPAP (Production Part Approval Process) Review approach that is typical in the automotive industry. Please note, that systematic and documenting work leads to extra cost.
The NPI deliverables review is part of a series of solutions that we recommend you take advantage of in order here at Sofeast.
- Start with a DFM review for Manufacturing in Asia where we will check your design files to ensure the materials & processes you’re selecting do not create any unnecessary difficulties & extra costs in production.
- Do the NPI deliverables review – that’s this solution!
- Finally, perform a Production Readiness Review (During Pilot Runs). We conduct a review at the factory during the pilot run/s before mass production properly starts so you can confirm readiness based on facts and have peace of mind that your risks are lower.
What does it cost?
This review is charged at 45USD per hour, to be quoted based on the project information.
In many cases, the deliverables are not very clear and it becomes a series of successive reviews (In most cases some documents are reworked after our initial review and need to be reviewed again).
We often quote a block value for these projects, starting from 2,000USD. Additional hours will be added as required upon your acceptance.
