Design hurdles come in all shapes and sizes. Creating a custom medical cart requires a lot of energy, time and forethought. Unfortunately, design hurdles still tend to creep up, and although it’s difficult to pinpoint what each project’s design hurdle will be, a couple seem to pop up more than others.
Design Changes
Applying design changes to your design plan is OK; in fact, we encourage it. We want you to have the optimal medical cart experience. However, constantly making changes because of an ambiguous design intent or poor communication results in frustration and additional expenses all around. In contingence with this, always saying “yes” to ideas and potential changes regardless of monetary consequences will hinder your ultimate goal.
Quantity
Medical cart design and production is more than just bringing concepts to life. Determining a realistic quantity for your product early on will eliminate over-purchasing and will make your project more economical. Some customers set themselves up for a quantity that is far too high for their budget. Be realistic about your project. “If your medical cart isn’t set to sell hundreds for a year or two, start with an interim cart and make changes as you go,” says New Project Engineer, Mark Collins. If you design a cart for high quantity and start off small, you’re going to be frustrated with the piece price quantity. Companies that originally design for high quantities can also afford to invest in injection molded parts. However, if this plan adjusts to low quantity output, money will be lost on production of those parts. Or, you run the risk of changing the design and being stuck with the inventory.
Some companies want to mass produce their custom medical carts right away; however, this rarely happens because custom medical carts are subject to evolve and adapt. One customer came to us with a design utilizing manufacturing processes geared toward quantities in the thousands. However, the forecasted volume was 50 a year. We weren’t willing to mass produce the original design, especially one that had such a high cost for injection molded tools. Therefore, HUI made a whole new design with soft tooling that best fit their purposes. Not only did this company profit from this decision, they also preferred the medical cart HUI designed for them.
At HUI, we understand that design hurdles happen, and we pride ourselves on our ability to overcome them. Contact us today to get your medical cart project underway.
