HUI’s process to create concepts for medical carts is unique, efficient and proven to get to a final concept sooner than other manufacturers—the total cycle time of the concept stage can be as short as three weeks.
To set the stage for creating a successful cart concept, it’s important to include anyone on your team who has influence and/or makes final decisions. Not having these people participate will increase the amount of time needed to complete the concept stage.
HUI’s concept stage is made up of four sub-stages:
1. Discovery
The discovery stage starts with a meeting between HUI’s design team and your design team to document requirements in a features and functions document. The features and functions document has 30+ specific questions to help focus in on specific design requirements. These features and functions questions range from usage environment, look and feel and equipment to human factors and intended shipping methods. This allows our design team understand the “could haves,” “should haves” and “must haves” of the project prior to starting the concept generation stage.
2. Concept Generation
The deliverables for the concept generation stage are completed during the first week: configuration print, several design concepts and estimated production & tooling cost for each concept. The configuration print is a document that organizes all the equipment and supplies used to generate industrial design concepts. Once the concepts are created, estimated production and tooling costs are compiled and submitted to your design team for review.
3. Concept Refinement
Concept refinement is an on-site meeting that happens a couple days after the concept generation stage. The purpose of this meeting is to review the provided concepts with your design team in order to reach a final rough concept by the end of that day. This meeting is structured into three parts:
- Mix and match: we go through each concept with the goal of creating a narrowed-down list of all the best features from each provided concept. (1-2 hours)
- HUI work time: HUI’s design team goes to work on creating a final concept with all the input from the mix and match meeting. (2-3 hours)
- Recap: HUI’s design team presents a rough final concept. This meeting is an important part of the day as everyone can see their ideas come to life, and everyone leaves with an agreed-upon concept in their heads. (1 hour)
4. Final Concept
The final concept is a polished version of the output from the concept refinement meeting. This is completed one week after the concept refinement meeting. Next stage: engineering!
Ready to start developing a concept for your next medical cart project? Contact us today!
