Helping the market understand a designer's innovative product is a great challenge, as is being a great designer. Because customers immediately want a cheaper product, but with good quality and creative design. However, these desired characteristics often contradict and hinder each other in our modern industrial life.
However, developing a business presentation template is a crucial process for creating a successful product, especially in such a competitive global market environment.
Fortunately, current technologies offer good opportunities to solve some of these problems. As rapid prototyping activities can often be very time-consuming and expensive, it is important to plan them well and use cutting-edge technologies such as rapid prototyping and virtual prototyping tools.
1. What is a presentation template?
The product development process consists of several phases, and each phase has different requirements for prototype parts. Industry or product requirements are different. Therefore, the definition of presentation models depends on the usage or more precisely on the requirements.
Most presentation prototypes are used for the following purposes:
- Gather initial user requirements
- Show your proof of concept to senior management
- Check system specifications
- Discover solutions to specific usability or design problems
- Deliver a proof of concept early
- Eliminate blur in the early stages of the project
- Validate evolving user needs
- Increase constructive user engagement
- Pre-train users or create a marketing demo
A presentation prototype can be a full-scale prototype, that is, a fully functional, full-size version of the product. It can also be built as a facade for a specific purpose – like a Hollywood set with just the front of the building constructed.
Before creating a prototype, it is very important to define the purpose of the prototype so that the level of detail of the prototype can be determined.
2. Why create presentation templates before the product hits the market?
A simple answer to the powerlessness of presentation templates comes from McKinsey:
If the product is delayed for 6 months, j You will lose 66% of your gross margin – McKinsey & Co.
To be competitive, products must be cheaper but of high quality and adapt to the changing needs of customers. Short product cycle times mean that more frequent product changes are required. Therefore, engineers have to use limited resources to produce a quality product in a short time.
Under these circumstances, successful product development may not be enough to keep the company running. A successful company must produce a range of high quality, affordable and consistent products. The secret to success lies in carefully executing critical tasks in the product definition phase. Presentation mockups or prototypes definitely play a key role in convincing your market and customers.
3. What challenges will arise during the presentation prototyping phase?
Despite the advantages of prototyping in product development, there are also some potential disadvantages to developing a prototype. It is important to note that misguided prototyping efforts do not contribute to the goals of the overall product development effort. These mistaken actions can actually cost the project valuable time, resources and money, without contributing anything to the process.
Below are the most common errors and problems that can arise during the product development phase.
3.1 Find solutions to specific usability or design problems
We recently received a case from a coffee machine designer in Austria who sent us a design with a great crystal appearance but with a material thickness of more than 40 mm. The product design looked very good, but ultimately it turned out that injection molding is not possible for such a thick wall thickness. In fact, there is no problem in making the presentation models with silicone molds exactly like their design, but the limitation is that the material is not UV resistant. Therefore, this perfect looking product is not suitable for mass production as it is not well designed for production tools and if we do not make changes to the design it will ultimately affect its release.
3.2 Material option and alternative
Most products are used in specialized areas such as medicine, automobile manufacturing or even aerospace. Some important components have critical material requirements. However, due to processing limitations or technological capabilities, we are sometimes unable to meet these requirements and have to propose alternative materials or technologies.
For example, one of our Indian customers requested a lamp housing (the prototype only needs 1 piece). The material must be machined using PP and CNC. After the engineering team investigated the feasibility of CNC machining, we discovered that it was not possible to machine the entire housing without machining gaps because there were too many undercuts. Even our 5-axis machine couldn't build it. The problem is that PP material is not suitable for gap processing because it cannot be glued. Therefore, we recommend using an alternative material – ABS/PC, which is strong enough and good for splitting and gluing.
3.3 Balancing costs and optimizing benefits
With minimal time and expense, you can find usability and design issues so you can tweak your design before investing large resources. This is why aeronautical engineers use wind tunnels to optimize aircraft profiles and why bridge builders create stress models before an actual bridge is built. The question arises of how to invest as little time and money as possible in the presentation phase of rapid prototyping?
Most of the time we can divide product development into smaller tasks and build different prototype parts in each phase. This way we avoid errors in the terminal.
Task 1: Conceptual design of a prototype
The prototype design must include customer requirements (a new product, a new assembly, or a new part) to formulate the problem.
Task 2: Prototype Parts and Components Configuration Design
After conceptual design, some prototype parts become standard components and configurations. In this task, designing involves selecting types or classes such as motor (DC, AC, stepper), spring (leaf, beam, coil spring), etc.
Task 3: Parametric Design
This task defines key dimensions and tolerance information and specifies the materials needed for the prototype.
Task 4: Detailed Planning
This task provides the remaining dimensions, tolerances, and material information for technical drawings.
To accomplish the above task, we can use prototyping technologies such as CNC machining, 3D printing, silicone tooling or rapid injection tooling.
University Degree
Choosing a prototyping technique for a product is a very critical issue and depends on many factors such as: B. Considerations of cost, cycle time, prototype part accuracy, material properties, part size, strength and availability of the piece. Most importantly, selection should be based on the purpose of prototyping.
