Case study

Challenge

• The customer, a building company, had assembled a team of electronic engineers to add ‘smart home’ functionality to their pre-fab builds.
• Their engineering team contacted us seeking a motor control system for blinds which would be used to automatically control external heating during summer, alongside traditional functions such as privacy.
• The customer had designed and prototyped a system that would enable the motor to be placed either side of the blind roller, but had performed no design-for-manufacture studies.

Solution

• We studied the design that the customer had prepared, and immediately noticed the challenges surrounding how readily it could be manufactured.
• The customer had designed their transfer gearbox with a specific motor in mind. We were able to counter-propose a smaller brushless gear motor with sufficient performance that would fit within the dimensions of a regular blind roller.
• This greatly simplified the mounting and integration of the blinds, the manufacturing costs, and enabled the customer to market the blinds outside of their regular pre-fab houses business.

Results

• We recognised that the customer’s engineering team had great ideas, but little experience in mass production, so proposed a different route for them to head down.
• Our final solution was more useful in a wider range of situations owing to its 60% more effective use of space with the blind cavity.
• Our mechanism was estimated to be 35% less cost to produce their design, which itself was far from being production ready.
• After only one engagement with PMD, our customer choose to make us a long-term partner.

STAGE 1

Designing for application

• We started the project with a design review of the customer’s existing design.
• The design looked great on paper, but had been created with an imperfect view of the gear motors that they could use.
• Their design was also impractical to manufacture efficiently without a lot of additional design work, and they had missed a different approach that saw the gear motor integrated inside the blind roller, instead of outside it.

STAGE 2

Testing and finalising

• Our proposed design was smaller, simpler, consumed less power but was not built like a tank. It was rather built under our value engineering principles, and was therefore more than ‘good enough’, but not overly engineered.
• We manufactured prototypes and proceeded to test them on our longevity dynamometers with the same loading they would experience in application.
• They passed, and the customer placed orders for their expected 18 month demand.

STAGE 3

Results and relationship

• The cost of manufacture was estimated to be 35% less with our design than with the original design, although this did not include any of the DFM work that would have been required (and amortised) on the customer’s design.
• 60% more effective use of space.
• After only one engagement with PMD our customer choose to make us a long-term partner responsible for the design of the complete product including manufacture, assembly and packaging.