Product Startup Podcast Episode 146: Improve Design for Manufacturing

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from a 20-year design for manufacturing expert on how to ensure a smooth transition

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: from product development to your first manufacturing run.

00:00:12 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:21 Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from

00:00:29 Narrator: initial idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.

00:00:39 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, on to the show.

00:00:49 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Michael Corr to the show.

00:00:52 Kevin Mako: Michael is the founder of Jural PDM, a product development management tool for centralizing the entire communication process from development to production.

00:00:59 Kevin Mako: They have thousands of users improving their design for manufacturing. process today. Michael is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and

00:01:06 Kevin Mako: small manufacturers can understand what design for manufacturing is, what is required to fill the

00:01:11 Kevin Mako: gap between product development and your first production run, and how to communicate effectively with all manufacturing stakeholders, especially on your first production run.

00:01:19 Kevin Mako: Now, on to the episode.

00:01:22 Kevin Mako: Hey, Michael, welcome to the show. Hi, pleasure to be here. I'm excited to talk to you today about design for manufacturing. You've been doing this for over

00:01:28 Kevin Mako: 20 years, and it's a really important subject, whether it's industrial design, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, or all three of those baked into your product,

00:01:36 Kevin Mako: whether you're starting a new product or you're expanding your product line, there becomes a transition between design and development, your design and prototyping work,

00:01:43 Kevin Mako: and then the eventual production of that. You've created beautiful software called Jero that helps smooth that process out.

00:01:49 Kevin Mako: But first and foremost, congratulations on a big funding round.

00:01:52 Michael Corr: I know you're just featured in TechCrunch there, so I'm excited to see Jero taking off. Oh, yeah. Thank you.

00:01:56 Michael Corr: We're really excited to getting some notoriety about the work that we're doing and really

00:02:00 Kevin Mako: helping the large hardware community. That's incredible. Give us a bit of a background. How did you get from where you are to now owning this amazing hardware platform

00:02:08 Michael Corr: with thousands of users? Yeah. So actually, my background, I'm an electrical engineer. I've been designing manufacturing products for over 20 years, a wide range of

00:02:17 Michael Corr: products, anything from telecom equipment to industrial drones, wearables, IoT, you name it. And I've seen quite a lot.

00:02:25 Michael Corr: I've worked a lot with overseas manufacturers, you know, predominantly tier three, but also tier two and tier one.

00:02:31 Michael Corr: I even have my own business working in Hong Kong, helping companies get up and running in Shenzhen, gain their products to production.

00:02:38 Michael Corr: And I've seen quite a lot of mistakes and also big wins and really learned along the way what does make a hardware company successful, certainly reducing their costs

00:02:47 Kevin Mako: and revision cycles to get to production successfully. That's great. Now you've obviously built software to help do that. Let's start big picture here.

00:02:55 Kevin Mako: Then we'll get into the nitty gritty details and some of the bigger tips and tips.

00:02:58 Michael Corr: But let's take it right to the top of the pyramid here. What is DFM?

00:03:03 Michael Corr: Yeah, it's a great question. It's something that I certainly did not learn my university or studying electrical engineering or even any mechanical engineering.

00:03:10 Michael Corr: It's something I learned on the job. But it's incredibly important and really helps more successful teams be more efficient with their design.

00:03:17 Michael Corr: So DFM, design for manufacturing abilities. It's a layer past making your designs functional, electrical circuit design or even

00:03:25 Michael Corr: mechanical assembly design, but making decisions to make it more easily manufactured.

00:03:30 Michael Corr: or more cost-effectively manufactured. And sometimes it has nothing to do with the functional purpose of the product,

00:03:37 Michael Corr: but maybe changing like a draft angle on a mechanical part or rearranging how your passives are laid out on your circuit board

00:03:44 Kevin Mako: can really improve the efficiency and improve the yield for manufacturability. This is a big deal because there's a transition

00:03:52 Kevin Mako: between designing and prototyping the product and making it work well and the actual production of those units.

00:03:58 Kevin Mako: And a lot of the time, especially for a hardware startup, that is a bit of an unknown. It's a void or a gap in your understanding of development.

00:04:06 Kevin Mako: The simple truth is if you design a product and even if you have a decent prototype, it's not yet ready for production.

00:04:13 Kevin Mako: There is this very critical next step that hopefully it's been designed well and designed professionally up to that point so that it is a relatively easy, let's call it starting

00:04:22 Kevin Mako: template to actually do the design for manufacturing. But there's that step, that gap where you take a great design.

00:04:28 Kevin Mako: And then you figure out all the little tiny, microscopic manufacturing details that all interrelate to figure out how to actually produce each and every

00:04:37 Kevin Mako: part and how to put those parts together. And that is a very critical step. And this is where so much of your experience lies. So let's get into it.

00:04:44 Kevin Mako: Talk a bit about what you've seen in that transition or some of the misunderstandings about

00:04:48 Michael Corr: it or whatever else from your design and carrying through into your actual production phase in that gap in the middle, which we call DFM or design for manufacturing.

00:04:56 Michael Corr: Yeah. Well, I mean, I can remember back to even earlier in my career and, you know, I had been through quite a handful of design cycles of PCBA as a electrical

00:05:05 Michael Corr: engineer, but I had never actually seen my designs being manufactured. I would just get the finished products, you know, back in my box, you know, my desk and I'd review them

00:05:14 Michael Corr: for functional purposes. But it wasn't until the first time I actually went to a factory and saw my

00:05:20 Michael Corr: personal designs being manufactured and how they were doing it, you know, mixed between the reflow or the wave. or hand soldering.

00:05:27 Michael Corr: And I started to ask questions because I saw some of the assembly team was hand soldering a handful of parts. And I asked them, why are you doing that? You know, that's very

00:05:36 Michael Corr: high risk, high cost, consistent. And they just flat out told me it's because the parts are too close together on the board.

00:05:43 Michael Corr: And our reflow equipment can't properly solder those reliably. And so we have to do it by hand. And I had never heard that before.

00:05:51 Michael Corr: And so I said, well, it's very simple for me to move those parts, you know, further apart. And they said, great. And I said, well, whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:06:00 Michael Corr: what else? You know, what else can you show me? What else should I be doing so that I can make your jobs easier?

00:06:06 Michael Corr: And that was like the huge light bulb that I had in my career, like, oh, it's not just

00:06:12 Michael Corr: about designing it for functionality, but it's also about how do I make it design so that it's easier and cheaper and more reliable to actually be manufactured.

00:06:21 Michael Corr: And that's what really opened up the door for me to kind of just consume as much as I could, not just on circuit board assembly,

00:06:28 Kevin Mako: but even mechanical parts, whether it's C&C or injection molding. How can we make subtle changes

00:06:34 Kevin Mako: that really improve the manufacturing and even assembly process? That stuff is so important because

00:06:41 Kevin Mako: first of all, it eases the speed, the time, the money to actually get to production, but it also means that the production yield will be better quality.

00:06:48 Kevin Mako: The units will be more reliable, more robust, possibly even and likely even cheaper if it's done well. We do all kinds of design and manufacturing.

00:06:56 Kevin Mako: The whole purpose at Aqua Design is to take that invention idea from that sketch on your head all the way through to production.

00:07:02 Kevin Mako: But one of the things that we found is extremely important and we've been doing for many years is even in the early concept design phases, it's important

00:07:09 Kevin Mako: to consider manufactureability. Obviously, we'll be able to get into the finite details until you're

00:07:14 Kevin Mako: further down the road into the detailed engineering and prototyping review and all that. But if you

00:07:17 Kevin Mako: build a model, like you said, in the early phases when you were working with that, that factory, slight changes, very basic fundamental observations to

00:07:25 Kevin Mako: the base functionality of your product. If you build those in from the beginning, that means all kinds of lower reworks in the

00:07:32 Kevin Mako: future, better quality, more time spent on the difficult details, less time spent on the easy

00:07:37 Kevin Mako: details. So one of the first things that I found that can be very helpful when you're thinking about producing a product is think about production from day one.

00:07:46 Kevin Mako: And then as you're getting closer and closer to production, of course, you should be moving your matrix from starting

00:07:51 Kevin Mako: heavy in design, light in production thinking, to heavy in production thinking, light and design.

00:07:56 Kevin Mako: And that kind of is flowing as you go through your rounds of prototypes and into your production

00:08:00 Michael Corr: and all that sort of thing. How does your history in looking at those sorts of things, and of course your software as well help with easing out those processes in between?

00:08:09 Michael Corr: Yeah, it's a great question. The way I like to think about it is what's the cost to fix an issue. And there's different units for when the issue is discovered.

00:08:18 Michael Corr: So when an issue is discovered during the design cycle, we'll say that that cost to fix it is like a unit value of one, right? The engineer catches the problem.

00:08:27 Michael Corr: They're already in design processing. They can very simply make the necessary adjustments. When something is in production or just pre-production, an

00:08:35 Michael Corr: issue is found, there's a higher cost because now those designs have disseminated to multiple teams. The original engineer sometimes has to be called back.

00:08:44 Michael Corr: It might have been weeks since they've even looked at that design, so they have to refresh their minds with it. So we'll say that cost to fix it as a unit of 10.

00:08:52 Michael Corr: And then the worst is if the product, the issue is found when the product's in the customer's hands,

00:08:57 Michael Corr: you know, and that's when it's already out in the field, who knows if it has to be recalled, or if it's just a one-off issue. And we'll say the cost to fix it at that point is the,

00:09:06 Michael Corr: you know, a value of 100, right? These are simple terms, which kind of exemplifies the point. And so the goal is always how do we constantly reduce the

00:09:14 Michael Corr: cost to fix something if and when an issue arises? And so you're always trying to empower the designers, the original engineering team,

00:09:22 Michael Corr: to have access to that information as early and easily as possible so that if an issue arises, whether it's from a design capability, whether it's from a

00:09:31 Michael Corr: supply chain issue, whether it's from a functionality issue, the cost to fix it is constantly reduced. And those are the types of things.

00:09:38 Michael Corr: And so focusing on DFM, obviously, you know, the more information a design engineer has.

00:09:44 Michael Corr: So there are basic principles about what are good practices for design for manufacturing and those are pretty ubiquitous.

00:09:50 Michael Corr: But there are nuances that are specific to the actual manufacturer, right? The manufacturer has their own equipment that they use to manufacture your product,

00:09:59 Michael Corr: which might vary from manufacturer to manufacturer or their own processes. And those two might have some nuances that are specific to that manufacturer.

00:10:07 Michael Corr: So it's not just about going to a book and reading what are the best practices, but actually talking to a manufacturer and say, how would you manufacture this design

00:10:16 Michael Corr: before you release it to them? And they can provide that feedback to you well because of the tolerances of our particular equipment.

00:10:24 Michael Corr: We need you to make these changes, or because of the processes that we use or prioritize, we need to make these changes.

00:10:29 Kevin Mako: And so, again, bringing that information to the designer up front reduces the cost to make that change.

00:10:36 Kevin Mako: If you wait until the design's actually been released and in the manufacturer's hands to get that feedback, you've now increased the cost to fix it.

00:10:45 Kevin Mako: That's brilliant. I love the fact that you're looking at the cost and explaining how it balloons over time

00:10:50 Kevin Mako: because one of the easy things on the outsider, at least it looks easy, to do in the early phase of development, saying, well, let's skip a prototype because we can figure that

00:10:59 Kevin Mako: out later in production because we're going to save whatever the few thousands or a few tens of thousands of dollars and not doing that version and not ironing out those bugs then.

00:11:08 Kevin Mako: Although that seemed like it might make sense to get you to production faster, all you're pushing the buck down the road and not only pushing it down the road, but substantially

00:11:17 Kevin Mako: enhancing that. Like you said, by the time it's in the customer's hands, that's far too late,

00:11:20 Kevin Mako: but understand that before that, there's also a ballooning effect that's occurring. So the more

00:11:24 Kevin Mako: that you can figure out before you're actually getting to the producer, or at least in combination

00:11:29 Kevin Mako: with the producer, the easier it will be to smooth those things out and you'll be reducing substantial cost down the road.

00:11:35 Kevin Mako: And I like really how you've paired that with the fact that every product is unique. Everything has their own nuances. So although you can build something to a

00:11:42 Kevin Mako: perfect design, perfect textbook spec, let's call it, in the first place. You've gone through design, engineering prototype, but you've got a good product.

00:11:48 Kevin Mako: It's built DFM to spec. Know that you need a little bit more than that. And that's where the true DFM work comes into play. Generally,

00:11:54 Kevin Mako: sometimes between your kind of final development prototype and your first production sample,

00:11:59 Kevin Mako: somewhere in between there is that moment where you're taking all those nuances, both from a

00:12:03 Michael Corr: product perspective, but also from the manufacturing logistics perspective. What equipment do

00:12:07 Michael Corr: they use and how do they use it specifically to making each of the parts on your unique product?

00:12:12 Michael Corr: That's where some of those little unique elements come into play, where it saves you a heck

00:12:16 Michael Corr: a lot more money in the long run to sort those out today than it does to wait till their problems tomorrow. There's something too that people need to really think through.

00:12:24 Michael Corr: Your manufacturers do have your best interest in mind and they want to help you, but they don't know your product as well as you do.

00:12:31 Michael Corr: So there's only so far that they can go to improve your product or make decisions around making more manufacturable without actually having negative impact.

00:12:39 Michael Corr: The best decision makers are always going to be you. Right. You want to do it in concert with your manufacturers and your suppliers, but it really falls on

00:12:46 Michael Corr: you and throwing the designs over the wall and say, well, we'll just fix it in manufacturing or rely on our contract manufacturer to fix it. They've got more experience in us.

00:12:54 Michael Corr: That's a little bit blindsided. Yes, they can do some things.

00:12:57 Kevin Mako: And certainly that's why you've hired them. They have access to more suppliers, to more processes. They've seen more things.

00:13:02 Kevin Mako: But they don't always know what the impact is going to be of a change. And so, again, you're just making it more expensive when you do throw it over the wall and rely.

00:13:12 Kevin Mako: on your contract manufacturer to be that backstop. It's really got to start from you. There's another really good point that's in there that you've mentioned is it's when you're at

00:13:21 Kevin Mako: that manufacturing phase, make sure that you've got your eyes on the price, primarily from your designers and engineers.

00:13:27 Kevin Mako: They need to be involved in that process because if you leave all of that decision making, especially on those detailed technical elements up to your manufacturer exclusively,

00:13:37 Kevin Mako: as you said, they may miss some things that really matter to your product, that they may not

00:13:41 Kevin Mako: see because remember, at the end of the day, a manufacturer's job is to produce parts and put them

00:13:44 Kevin Mako: together. Their job is not to figure out what is best for your product or how that product's going to work in the marketplace. Obviously, there's some consideration.

00:13:52 Kevin Mako: Good manufacturers have a bit

00:13:53 Michael Corr: of insight in that, but it's a fraction of what your designers or yourself or your engineers are going to have in terms of insight, not only because they understand these

00:14:03 Michael Corr: processes from a market perspective better, but because they've been working on this product for months, sometimes years. So it's well ingrained into the souls of your design team.

00:14:12 Michael Corr: Yeah, or they've already thought through that solution. They've already evaluated why it won't work. And so your contract manufacturer will have done that research.

00:14:19 Michael Corr: So there's just a couple other things to highlight, too. So I just want to emphasize how important it is to incorporate your manufacturers into your process, right?

00:14:27 Michael Corr: So creating that feedback loop, creating that connectivity, that communication. But it's also important to make sure that

00:14:35 Michael Corr: communication channels are there, to make it even happen. right so from my own experience you know working for a long time in chenzhen with chinese manufacturers

00:14:45 Michael Corr: there's a culture there at least it has been in the past and i feel like it's changing where they feel that they own the process and they

00:14:54 Michael Corr: own the scars and so if there's any problems with production that's on them to fix and they don't always share that with you and

00:15:03 Michael Corr: so it creates these barriers these communication barriers right so not only do you have to set up a relationship

00:15:09 Michael Corr: where you can have this mutual trust saying, no, we want you to show us the issues, right? So when I was really entrenched in factories in Shenzhen, first

00:15:18 Michael Corr: off, most of them had proprietary software, MES software that managed their jobs and actually captured the, you know, the first past yield and

00:15:26 Michael Corr: the failed codes and all that kind of stuff. And it was very hard to get access to it, both technically as well as culturally, because they felt it was exposing their weaknesses.

00:15:34 Michael Corr: Even though I constantly confirm with them that, no, I need to see these failures, like the more. you share with me, what are the fail codes, what are the most common causes

00:15:44 Michael Corr: for rework or failures in your tests, I can go back to the design and help make sure to improve that. It's not always on

00:15:53 Michael Corr: them to fix the problem. A lot of times it's on the design team to fix those problems, right? And so,

00:16:00 Michael Corr: that needs to be established early on, the economy manufacturer is a relationship of trust and communication, that feedback loop, right?

00:16:09 Michael Corr: Because otherwise, you're just making the problem harder.

00:16:12 Kevin Mako: You're adding more cost. You're not really improving the process overall. And so whether it's a social

00:16:18 Kevin Mako: contract or there's actually a technical integration where your CAD software, your PLM software is

00:16:26 Kevin Mako: connected to their MES software in more real time, it's going to constantly improve that feedback loop. That's really good advice.

00:16:34 Kevin Mako: Communication is key. In all, all, of development, but particularly as you're getting into the manufacturing specking. And it's really simple. More eyes on the price, the better.

00:16:42 Kevin Mako: You've got a lot of smart designers and engineers building your product.

00:16:45 Kevin Mako: Have them closely knit with the manufacturer because some of the problems they may not be able to help with. Other ones, they may have surprising insight to.

00:16:53 Kevin Mako: And in both directions, that's what you talked about earlier, having the manufacturers

00:16:56 Kevin Mako: weigh in on some late stage development ideation, possibly even some earlier stage development ideation, subsequently going the other direction.

00:17:03 Kevin Mako: When it's in production, making sure that your design team has some insight and help into manufacturing. The other thing you have to keep in mind as well, especially if you're

00:17:10 Kevin Mako: working with a design firm or working with a larger design team. You have a lot of industrial

00:17:13 Kevin Mako: designers, mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, firmware designers, you name it, that have a tremendous amount of experience in a variety of manufacturing processes

00:17:22 Kevin Mako: on a variety of different products. You may actually be the manufacturing expert for that manufacturing problem that comes

00:17:29 Kevin Mako: up, even if you're on the industrial design team as an example. And it's very important that you make

00:17:34 Michael Corr: sure that that communication is there so that those nuggets of information that outside the box thinking, the alternative thinking on a certain problem or solution, is there

00:17:43 Michael Corr: being presented and open between the teams. And I know, Michael, you talk a lot about this transparency in the process. That's what we're talking about here.

00:17:53 Michael Corr: Just explain really what that means when you talk about transparency in the DFM process between all these different stakeholders.

00:18:00 Michael Corr: Yeah. Well, so to elaborate an earlier comment, it's not just getting those reports, right? The first past the yield reports or the fail code reports or exactly what the steps were

00:18:10 Michael Corr: for manufacturing or product, but it's making sure you get them in a timely and exhaustive manner. Also, from my experience,

00:18:17 Michael Corr: when I did finally get to a point where the contract manufacturers felt comfortable sharing their reports with me, it was often after the production run was completed.

00:18:27 Michael Corr: And so along with however many units I ordered and was shipped overseas back to the US, I get a printed on paper

00:18:35 Michael Corr: report the results of all the tests of each of the units. And so while it was helpful, it wasn't efficient. I had to manually comb through it, but also because of the time

00:18:45 Michael Corr: lapse, I had already started working on the designs for the next production. And so you kind of get what's called out of phase.

00:18:52 Michael Corr: And so if the feedback comes back too late from production run one, not enough time to actually impact

00:18:58 Michael Corr: production run two, it would only be able to take effect until production run three. And so it's not just getting the information at all, but getting in a timely and

00:19:08 Michael Corr: exhaustive and preferably digital manner. So you can take corrective action much sooner. And depending on your relationship with your supplier, perhaps even in real time, right?

00:19:18 Kevin Mako: And so that's what I was also referring to earlier when I said things are changing. It has been a while since I've actually been on

00:19:23 Kevin Mako: shop four because, as you noted, I'm now running a company that actually provides software that improves transparency, right?

00:19:29 Kevin Mako: I recognize this problem and how prevalent was in the industry and wanted to do something about it.

00:19:33 Michael Corr: And so that's what Dura Labs is all about, is really promoting transparency and removing the friction to even make these communication channels exist and connect

00:19:42 Michael Corr: between all the different players. Let's talk a bit more about that and how that actually

00:19:46 Michael Corr: works. The Dural platform, essentially, you're trying to get to that real-time information,

00:19:52 Michael Corr: exhaustive, so you're getting all the information. But of course, the big one you also trickled in there, too, is you want to sort the information.

00:19:57 Michael Corr: So how do you handle those things within the platform that you're offering? A lot of it's really based on what has evolved in the technology space.

00:20:07 Michael Corr: So the hardware industry has been around for quite a while, obviously, and is using a lot

00:20:12 Michael Corr: of technologies and workflows that were established in the 80s and 90s. And to be honest, it hasn't really evolved much and kind of out of scope with this conversation,

00:20:21 Michael Corr: but part of it's just because the demand hasn't been there to change. But what we've seen in the last close to 10 years is a very big cultural shift on who is developing hardware.

00:20:31 Michael Corr: It's now engineers who fundamentally understand software design principles and agile workflows, right?

00:20:38 Michael Corr: Young engineers, electrical, mechanical, are now formally studying software as part of their curriculum at university. And so they fundamentally understand these.

00:20:48 Michael Corr: Whereas back in my day, you know, that wasn't always the norm, which certainly wasn't required. So this new culture of engineers is looking for software tools

00:20:57 Michael Corr: that help them with their hardware design that implement these software agile best practices and principles and

00:21:03 Michael Corr: adopt what are now commodity technologies like APIs or data models, where it is very easy to connect two different systems and have the data flow transparently

00:21:12 Michael Corr: with very much effort to get the two to connect. And that's where I feel a lot of the predecessors, the technologies that have been around for so long have fallen flat.

00:21:21 Michael Corr: And they haven't really adopted this capability of making it seamless to, quote, plug in play between the different providers of the hardware ecosystem.

00:21:31 Kevin Mako: And so that's what DURL's fundamental is all about, is how do we make it so simple using APIs,

00:21:38 Kevin Mako: using modern data models to make it easy for you to plug in your CAD tool into a revisioning system,

00:21:45 Kevin Mako: the PLM system, to plug in your MES system or your ERP so that none of the teams

00:21:51 Michael Corr: are slowed down by manual processes to transfer the data, right? So there's no more printed paperwork. There's no more emails. It's all digital.

00:22:01 Michael Corr: It's all exhaustive. And it's all automatic. That's great. If someone wants to learn more, what's the website they can reach you at? Yeah, our website is getduro.com.

00:22:11 Michael Corr: Get duro.com. And as always, I'll put the links in the show notes below, also to your LinkedIn as well.

00:22:17 Michael Corr: Michael, really appreciate your words of wisdom today on design for manufacturing.

00:22:21 Narrator: again. Yeah, thank you. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast,

00:22:27 Narrator: the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success.

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00:23:04 Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.