Meeting a Tight Deadline

In my capacity as a Product Designer, I was charged with modifying an existing injection molded part to add a pair of “finger grips”. As presented, it was not a very challenging assignment. What made it difficult was that this change had to be completed, and saleable parts produced, within three weeks in order for them to be available at an upcoming trade show. An injection mold took a minimum of twelve weeks to manufacture. Added to that would be the time required to design and receive approvals for a new part and the necessary functional testing after the first prototypes were produced.

Although we already had an 8 cavity production tool for our existing part - one without the finger grips there was not enough room in the existing tool to incorporate the requested grips. There would be enough room to add the grips to four of the cavities if I removed the other four cavities and used the space left behind. In order to accomplish my assignment I would have to reduce our production capacity by half while increasing our part cost by approximately 40%.

After discussing my proposed solution with our molder to determine how much additional overtime cost would be incurred in order to meet the deadline, I presented the proposal it to my manager as the only solution that would meet the time constraint. I was certain that my “out of the box” proposal would be rejected, the time constraint lifted and a reasonable schedule substituted. Instead he presented it to the New Product Committee which accepted it. It seems that one of our competitors had just introduced such a product and it was receiving rave reviews by the end users.

After the introduction at the show, we ordered a new production tool for the part and returned the modified mold to its original configuration. This was a case of timing and corporate image being the driving factors and cost considerations a distant third.

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