Do Inventors Need a Product Engineer?

Do Inventors Need a Product Engineer?

زهرة شوبينج اونلاين    January 03, 2011   

By Fred Heys

A product engineer is a person that can design, develop, and manage new product ideas for corporations or individual inventors. Being an engineer is not always required, but the person must be familiar with all phases of the Product Development Cycle, and keep up with the latest technologies. Also, the designer has to combine technical knowledge, human factors, and creativity in order to make a product successful in the marketplace.

The responsibility of a Product Design Engineer is to take an idea and develop it so that it can be produced and sold. He or she must select the materials, type of prototyping, tooling, and manufacturing methods that are cost effective and meet the Product Definition. This person should also be able to generate drawings and 3D models that will be used for tooling, Prototyping, patents, marketing, and manufacturing. Some engineers even help with branding, packaging and testing as needed.

A unique set of conditions comes with each Product Idea. These include, but are not limited to finances, time lines, and goals. Product Designers consider these to be normal, and deal with them routinely. A design engineer is often a person who is curious about how things are made, and how they function. By nature, they are creative, artistic, and have vivid imaginations. These attributes, as well as others, provide them an advantage in designing products that appeal to consumers.

If you're reading this because you are an inventor, you are basically a product engineer. You have a new idea, or believe that you can make an improvement to an existing product, right?

Now you can be the product engineer by taking control of your invention and going through The Product Development Cycle. You may choose to skip phases when possible, spending time and money on areas that are practical for your invention. If you have already paid for a Patent and you believe people are wasting your money on marketing, regain control of your idea. You can develop it yourself, or hire someone else to do it.

What Is The Production Engineering?

What Is The Production Engineering?

زهرة شوبينج اونلاين    January 01, 2011   

A branch of engineering that involves the design, control, and continuous improvement of integrated systems in order to provide customers with high-quality goods and services in a timely, cost-effective manner. It is an interdisciplinary area requiring the collaboration of individuals trained in industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, product design, marketing, finance, and corporate planning. In many organizations, production engineering activities are carried out by teams of individuals with different skills rather than by a formal production engineering department.

In product design, the production engineering team works with the designers, helping them to develop a product that can be manufactured economically while preserving its functionality. Features of the product that will significantly increase its cost are identified, and alternative, cheaper means of obtaining the desired functionality are investigated and suggested to the designers. The process of concurrently developing the product design and the production process is referred to by several names such as design for manufacturability, design for assembly, and concurrent engineering. See also Design standards; Process engineering; Product design; Production planning.

The specification of the production process should proceed concurrently with the development of the product design. This involves selecting the manufacturing processes and technology required to achieve the most economical and effective production. The technologies chosen will depend on many factors, such as the required production volume, the skills of the available work force, market trends, and economic considerations. In manufacturing industries, this requires activities such as the design of tools, dies, and fixtures; the specification of speeds and feeds for machine tools; and the specification of process recipes for chemical processes.

Actual production of physical products usually begins with a few prototype units being manufactured in research and development or design laboratories for evaluation by designers, the production engineering team, and sales and marketing personnel. The goal of this pilot phase is to give the production engineering team hands-on experience making the product, allowing problems to be identified and remedied before investing in additional production equipment or shipping defective products to the customer. The pilot production process involves changes to the product design and fine-tuning of unit manufacturing processes, work methods, production equipment, and materials to achieve an optimal trade-off between cost, functionality, and product quality and reliability. See also Pilot production; Prototype.

The production facility itself can be designed around the sequence of operations required by the product, referred to as a product layout. General-purpose production machinery is used, and often must be set up for each individual burrito, incurring significant changeover times while this takes place. This type of production facility is usually organized in a process layout, where equipment with similar functions is grouped together. See also Human-machine systems; Production methods.

The production engineering process does not stop once the product has been put into production. A major function of production engineering is continuous improvement�continually striving to eliminate inefficiencies in the system and to incorporate and advance the frontier of the best existing practice. The task of production engineering is to identify potential areas for improving the performance of the production system as a whole, and to develop the necessary solutions in these areas.