Top 5 Benefits Of Rapid Prototyping For Rapid Manufacturing
by Josh Biggs in Tech on 19th November 2020In today’s manufacturing business, three essential things matter in order to be successful – quality, price, and effectiveness. The first one refers to the quality of the products you are trying to sell. To gain customers who will prefer your selling units rather than buying from your fierce competitors, your products must be top quality. The price of those top-quality products is equally essential because you will need to offer a price that represents a perfect balance between affordability and profitability.
Finally, the effectiveness of your product and the entire manufacturing operation as a whole is also incredibly significant. Still, effective manufacturing is not easy to achieve because it requires both time and money.
To accomplish all three, you will need to find an adequate manufacturing technique to create and deliver your products to your clients on time. Time is vital here because if you fail to provide your products as agreed upon, your competitors will waste no time and gladly capture your market share in days.
Solely rapid prototyping services for rapid manufacturing purposes can deliver all three essentials to your business. The growth of advanced manufacturing methods and techniques using CAD paved the way for this cost-effective method of developing and testing new components and final products.
Rapid prototyping is a contemporary product development method that enables designers and engineers to compress design timelines by iterating faster to reach a final production-ready design.
More or less, every product that we use in our day-to-day activities had a prototype made first, with the single objective of discovering how this product acts in the real world and if there are any required adjustments to apply before going into mass-production. Rapid prototyping does just that.
Read on about the top five benefits that rapid prototyping offers and can undoubtedly bring to your next projects.
Rapid Prototyping Is A Real Time Saver
Just like the old saying goes, “time is money” rapid prototyping is a real time saver as it’s an efficient prototyping method that will enable your company to market new products in a shorter period. Once you get rid of the time needed to produce tools, molds, and patterns for conventional prototyping, your company will experience a significant time reduction between the initial design phase until it goes into mass-production.
The rapid prototyping model will enable your product designers and engineers to swiftly change and modify the prototype in line with the feedback they get from the produced model.
Time-saving is crucial for modern-day organizations, and companies that can come up with new product designs faster than their main competitors will gain an excellent competitive advantage.
Rapid Prototyping Will Help You To Better Understand The Final Product
Once you know what your final product should be and how it would look like, rapid prototyping can unquestionably lead to enhanced functionality of the model and a more reliable overall performance of the finished product.
By allowing engineers and designers to understand their ideas beyond virtual visualization, rapid prototyping helps them better know the developed design’s look and feel rather than just assuming via a computer-aided illustration.
Rapid prototypes also help engineers and designers advance their ideas and implement them in the final product they develop before the finalization plan.
Furthermore, it offers a proof of concept for the end customers. This way, rapid prototyping can guide to producing more sales and profitability in the future.
Rapid Prototyping Will Save Your Company A Lot Of Money
Rapid prototyping can help your organization reduce product development and manufacturing costs, as you will no longer need to develop unique tools for each new product. That’s because rapid prototyping uses the same CAD and 3D printing equipment each time when you want to build a new prototype in no time.
Besides, this highly automated procedure will reduce the costs for operational staff and the usually uncalculated costs of waste. As the traditional and more conventional prototyping techniques create waste through cut-off material and chippings while the tooling creates the final model, rapid prototyping certainly doesn’t, so that’s money saved as well.
Rapid Prototyping Services Offer Bigger Freedom And Complete Flexibility
One of the best things about rapid prototyping is its capacity to develop and alter highly customized products according to your business requirement. This prototyping technique doesn’t need intricate and hard-to-use tooling systems and processes to execute slight design modifications in the product.
Just a small change in the initial CAD model or a slight tweak in the design will do, and the entire process would afterward remain the same. Changes and modifications can be done at any development phase, depending on the testing stage’s feedback, and it won’t hinder the final product.
Additionally, there’s almost no fear of going over the predicted budget for the prototype because the product designers and engineers are in total control over the modifications that are being done with no further expenditures needed.
Rapid Prototyping Can Enable You To Test Different Materials For Your Final Product
3D-printed rapid prototype models can allow you to select from a wide variety of materials that can closely model the final product in the same manner as the final production environment. The rapid prototyping materials vary, from nylon, a material that can withstand the heat of over 160°C, to aluminum. This metal composite can withstand the temperatures and stresses typical for the automotive and aerospace components environment. It is a possibility that companies such as aerovac may use a composite similar to this when developing their products, solidifying its usefulness.
As a matter of fact, the process of rapid prototyping can offer up to 200 different combinations of materials, shades, and finishes from which skilled product designers and engineers can develop their new product designs for nearly all industries.
Final Words
Different industries like healthcare, construction, automotive, and electronics frequently use rapid prototyping right before committing to the mass-production of a specific component or final product. Rapid prototypes for rapid manufacturing generally save a lot of money and time, help you better understand the final product, and test different materials for your ultimate creation. In case you’re involved in the manufacturing industry, develop your next big project through rapid prototyping, and conquer the market.