As an engineer or product development team, you likely have brilliant ideas for new products that could disrupt your industry. But translating those conceptual designs into physical reality is often easier said than done.
Conventional manufacturing methods and standard inventory materials may simply not suffice when you’re pioneering completely new products.
This is where partnering with an expert custom fabricator like Engineered Mechanical Systems can make all the difference.
Custom fabrication provides the flexibility and capabilities to produce parts and products to your exact specifications, no matter how complex or unconventional the design.
In this article, we’ll look at three key benefits custom fabrication offers for bringing innovative new product designs to market:
- Ability to work with any material and part geometry
- Swift prototyping of concepts
- Seamless scaling to production
By leveraging these advantages, custom fabrication enables product developers, startups, and established companies alike to translate their wildest visions into functioning end products.
Read on to learn how custom fabrication removes manufacturing roadblocks and accelerates raw ingenuity into transformative new product releases.
Ability to Work with Any Material and Geometry
One of the biggest advantages of custom fabrication is the ability to produce parts from virtually any material using any required shape, contour, or design feature.
This design freedom stems from the range of advanced manufacturing technologies expert fabricators possess.
Custom fabricators like EMS utilize processes like CNC machining, precision sheet metal forming, die casting, extrusion, and more.
This versatile equipment allows handling exotic alloys, high-strength composites, and plastics that would be impossible, extremely difficult, or cost-prohibitive with standard fabrication means.
Similarly, custom fabrication places no restrictions on part geometries. Undercuts, thin walls, negative draft angles, and other design elements that cannot be injection molded or die casted are no problem with CNC machining or additive manufacturing.
Parts too large to be stamped or requiring convoluted internal features benefit from custom fabrication’s flexibility.
This opens up exciting possibilities for product developers. With custom fabrication, groundbreaking material choices and designs once considered manufacturing “wishful thinking” become viable options.
Companies can incorporate the ideal material for performance needs and innovate ergonomic part geometry free of fabrication constraints.
Swift Prototyping of Concepts
Another major advantage of partnering with a custom fabricator is the ability to swiftly prototype early-stage concepts and test models.
Rather than getting bogged down with months of design-for-manufacturing work, custom fabrication allows rapid realization of prototypes.
With processes like CNC machining and 3D printing, concept models can be fabricated from CAD files in a matter of days.
Quick iteration allows developers to trial more design options, refine the product via real-world testing, and finalize key details like ergonomics and part fitment.
The fast prototype turnaround provides tremendous time-to-market advantages. Products get out of theoretical documentation and into hands faster for user feedback. Data from functional prototypes feeds back into rapid design revisions.
This accelerated concept refinement is impossible with conventional production systems requiring hard tooling.
Custom fabricators also possess in-house finishing capabilities to give prototypes a production-ready look and feel using techniques like powder coating, anodizing, media blasting, and more. This facilitates effective focus group evaluations and even limited market testing of early units.
Overall, quick-turn custom fabrication prototyping enables developers to investigate 10x more concepts, optimize the design, and shave months to years off the development timeline.
Seamless Scaling to Production
The final major benefit of custom fabrication is the ability to seamlessly scale a product from the prototype stage to full production.
Expert fabricators possess a diverse manufacturing ecosystem and global supply chain relationships to support customers through every stage of product development.
Once prototypes are finalized, custom fabricators can leverage their expertise to transition designs into interim pilot runs. This provides real-world manufacturing process data to inform potential design refinements and optimize the production process before high-volume tooling investments.
When ready for mass production, capabilities like plastic injection molding, die casting, and stamping can cost-effectively scale volumes.
Or, fixtures and jigs can augment CNC machining productivity. Support is also provided for global sourcing of any required materials and components.
This seamless scaling from early prototyping to the customer shipping end products is a major differentiator versus attempting to patchwork it together across different suppliers.
Custom fabricators offer the knowledge, experience, and manufacturing breadth to guide a product from concept inception to store shelves.
The production ramp support also reduces risks and surprises down the line. Manufacturing process development happens in parallel rather than scrambling last minute.
This further accelerates speed-to-market and ensures product quality.
Realize Your Product Vision with Custom Fabrication
Bringing innovative new product designs to life is no easy task, but custom fabrication provides the manufacturing flexibility and expertise required to turn concepts into reality.
As we've explored, the key benefits include:
- Ability to use any material and part geometry
- Swift prototyping of concepts
- Seamless scaling from prototypes to production
By leveraging these capabilities, developers can fully realize their product vision without compromises or manufacturing restrictions. Expert custom fabricators become an extension of the team to provide invaluable knowledge and manufacturing firepower.
At EMS, our 30+ years of experience producing custom fabricated parts and new products for startups and leading global brands makes us an ideal partner.
We invite you to contact us today to discuss your specific project needs and discover how custom fabrication can help you bring groundbreaking product innovations to market.
To get started, please contact us today. Our team looks forward to helping unlock your product potential through custom fabrication.