Time to Market
Ready, Set, Go!
“Time to Market”- What does this phrase really mean? During my 17 years of living in the aerospace and defense world where light weight, corrosion resistance, and robust products are not only the norm but have come to be expected, the phrase “Time to Market” (aka. T2M) has been used quite often by many companies I’ve worked with.
T2M is essentially the timeline of events that occur when taking a concept or idea to the market place. It’s basically what separates the market leaders from the market followers.
What are these “T2M” timeline of events? Well, creating a napkin sketch or generating a 3 dimensional model on the computer are good but I’ve found that a prototype SLA (that’s typically produced in a day) can be priceless especially when using it to see, touch and show the product that you are intending to produce. This saves design time and costly form, fit and limited function modifications down the road!
The next step in the timeline is typically getting a hand full of parts made for testing. These can be more SLA’s, machined parts from near net stock shapes or possibly cast urethane parts where the tooling is inexpensive and produces a usable, robust, testable part.
Frequently field testing occurs next in the timeline of events and this is where you would normally want a part that’s produced from the same process of intended production. QTM – Quick Turn Manufacturing is a term that is used within Spectrum Plastics that represents a tooling standardization in support of rapidly deployed requirements. Say your requirement is for 3000pcs and you need a tool in 3 weeks or less- our DynaClass 1 tool would be the answer! All of a sudden the requirement jumped to 100K total life of the program and you need the tool in 4-6 weeks with parts – a DynaClass 3 tool would be your answer!
I have been around the industry for quite a while now, and have experience with a number of prototype houses and molders. What excites me about Spectrum is how we really do live out our mission statement on a daily basis. Spectrum’s Core Focus- “Quickly turning engineering concepts into high quality products.” is what we say, it’s what we do and it’s exactly what the Aerospace and Defense Industries require!
