Prototyping & Product Optimisation

Product optimisation adds value to your product design cycle. 

While optimisation is a vital part of the product design and development process, attempting this too early can stifle innovation, place undue pressure on the design brief and delay progress.

As the design matures, optimisation opportunities become clearer and can be fed back into the design with minimal impact. Functionality, performance and aesthetics are better optimised through prototyping, where changes can be carried out and validated quickly. Physical prototypes can also help you engage other business areas, optimising everything from downstream production and assembly to marketing requirements. 

Utilising our range of product optimisation services at the right time can significantly reduce risk, cut costs and generate the competitive advantage your product needs to succeed.

Proof of Concept

Concept sketches and CAD designs can provide 'in-principle' solutions. But where innovation, technology and multiple dependencies are involved, unknown issues are likely to arise. With our proof of concept models, we can help you identify these issues early and mitigate any risks.

Proof of concept models are basic but functional. They can help isolate the mechanical, electrical and electronic unknowns, demonstrate feasibility, highlight technical issues and gather vital information to be fed back into the design.

Investment at this stage significantly reduces risk and cost, and provides a level of confidence to your business case, ahead of further downstream investment.

Appearance Models

Mood boards define the early-appearance roadmap, and photo-realistic rendering can bring your designs to life. Yet they often lack either the sensory or user-interface feedback needed to truly evaluate a product.

Using the latest 3D rapid prototyping techniques, we can produce highly accurate and detailed appearance models to assess fit, form and finish, while evaluating the ergonomics, degrees of motion and how the user interacts with the product. 

This valuable information can be combined with consumer and target market feedback to shape the final design, creating stylish, intuitive and easy-to-use products that maximise your product’s potential and market appeal.

Functional Prototypes 

Functional prototypes contain all the engineering elements, functionality and form of the final product. Producing a functional prototype ahead of full-scale production, tooling and capital investment can: 

  • Significantly reduce risk and provide final design verification
  • Enable operational extremes and maximum loading to be applied to validate the design
  • Provide costs and product optimisation opportunities
  • Prepare downstream business functions such as production, assembly and training
  • Support patent application activity
  • Evaluated transport, shipping and packaging requirements
  • Support marketing activity

Reverse Engineering

There are very few truly original products. For those that are, it’s unlikely they’ll use all original parts, processes and techniques, and almost inevitably there will be competition or market forces that the product needs to address.

Engineers have a common motto: "there is no need to reinvent the wheel". While staying mindful of plagiarism and copyright, there is still real value in analysing both your existing products and the best of the competition to understand:

  • What is missing and where limitations lie
  • Any optimisation and cost reductions opportunities
  • Where parts, processes and business standardisation can be applied
  • Where improvements can be made and a competitive edge created.

Our team of experienced engineers can apply reverse engineering techniques to quickly and cost-effectively gain knowledge to define or verify the design brief and requirements, and shape the design.

Through product optimisation and functional prototyping you will gain the confidence to move into the final product development phase – production and build.