Top 3 Benefits of Hiring a Design and Manufacturing Group
4 min readA quality design agency can save you time and money by producing high-quality presentations that will impress your clients. However, it’s not cheap to have a dedicated team of designers on staff at all times.
In a workflow where manufacturing and design departments are separate, it’s easy for projects to get off track. Experienced turnkey suppliers can provide a streamlined process for making mid-project adjustments.
1. Save Time and Money
When you’re bringing a new physical product to market, you have to design it with manufacturability in mind. Taking the time to address this at an early stage will save you money when it comes to production costs and help your final product come to market sooner.
When hiring a design agency, you’ll have access to a team of professionals who can work on your project without needing to pull other employees off other tasks. This saves you the cost of paying an employee’s salary and allows your agency to complete the project within a specified budget.
Another way you’ll save money when working with a design agency is by eliminating the risk of budget discrepancies between companies. Agencies are used to dealing with multiple clients and suppliers, which means that they have a strong understanding of what it takes to deliver quality work in a timely manner. This gives them the ability to provide accurate construction estimates, as well as a single point of contact for the entire process.
Additionally, when you partner with a design and manufacturing group, you’ll benefit from their experience dealing with different countries’ labor laws. This will help you avoid the potential for unwelcome interference from rapacious unions or outdated government regulations. This is important, especially in light of the recent tariff war between America and China, which has impacted many supply chains and manufacturing operations worldwide.
2. Increase Product Quality
A company needs to create high-quality products to attract and retain consumers. Professional design companies can help a company develop designs that will meet and exceed consumer expectations.
The quality of a product is influenced by a number of factors at every stage of the buying process. A company can use targeted surveys, product ratings, reviews, and other data to get a big picture of customer perceptions of product quality.
Another important component of quality is production speed. Successful manufacturing operations know when to increase or decrease production rates. They also make quick changes to address production problems before they affect customers’ satisfaction. The ability to collect good data is essential for these processes. Companies can gather information by using metrics, financial data, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Companies may hire a factory partner to fabricate specific components, assist with research and development, suggest design improvements, build a prototype, assemble a product, or handle product warehousing or distribution. These factory partners typically work with multiple businesses and are rarely able to dedicate all of their resources to one company at any given time.
A contract manufacturer is a type of factory partner that provides a turnkey service, handling nearly all aspects of production for a set fee. This type of factory partner typically requires a company to provide the design for the products and their specifications. However, they can offer different services depending on the hiring company’s needs, such as identifying potential risks in the product design or suggesting improvements to achieve a particular goal.
3. Gain Access to Expertise
The design and manufacturing groups that you hire will have a greater understanding of how to best manufacture your product. They will know how to get the most out of your components and create a product that is optimised for consumer use. They will also have modern perspectives that can help your product stand out in a crowded market.
Finding and hiring the right employees can be a challenge for manufacturing companies. Employees need to be able to work well under pressure and think fast when it comes to problem-solving. Additionally, they need to be able to learn quickly and perform a variety of tasks without much supervision.
Hiring agencies can be a great option for sourcing and vetting candidates for manufacturing jobs. They can also help to ensure that job descriptions are free from grammatical errors and other issues that could turn off applicants.
4. Reduce Risk
When bringing a new product to market, missteps can quickly add up and increase costs and timelines. Typically, these problems come from poor design for manufacturing (DFM).
Hiring a group that specializes in DFM can save you time and money by working with your team to ensure that the product is fully optimized for production. This can include reducing part size to save on materials, improving assembly efficiency, addressing potential issues with injection molding or minimizing weld marks that will appear on the finished product.
Contract manufacturers can also spot and recommend ways to reduce risks in the design, such as eliminating unnecessary parts or features that make the product expensive to manufacture. These recommendations can save you significant time and money when launching your product into the market, while also ensuring that you’re delivering the best quality possible.
The hiring company can then work with the contract manufacturer to create products and deliver prototypes or samples of their new product, along with instructions for how the final product should look and function. However, it’s important to note that hiring a contract manufacturer does not transfer the intellectual property rights to those products. This means that a competing company could produce similar products based on the same design and sell them for less. This is why it’s so important to have a well-defined plan for protecting intellectual property and managing risk in the manufacturing process.