The client Beta LaserMike is a world leading supplier of instrumentation for the Wire and Cable industry and the Capscan capacitance probe is part of the wide portfolio of products that they offer.
The Capscan capacitance probe was developed in 1997 from the previous generation of probes to meet the requirements of the European EMC directive. This development enhanced the quality of the product, however it also added to the cost of manufacture.
We identified two major steps to reducing the cost of the Capscan product range. The first was a review and re-design of the product, implementing “Design for manufacture and test”. The second was to ensure that the product design and documentation were in a form to enable manufacture to be outsourced and so further reduce the manufacturing cost.
I had worked previously for Beta LaserMike in both a technical and a marketing role, and had been heavily involved in the development of the earlier Capscan probes. This gave me a technical insight into the critical nature of the design.
The solution was to collect together the manufacturing and engineering ideas generated by the previous design and incorporate these in a requirements specification and a design brief. We involved a product design consultant who suggested an imaginative way of assembling the measuring head. This eliminated many of the complex manufacturing steps that had been part of the previous design. The components in the new design were manufactured using simple machining operations and the use of adhesives in the final assembly was minimised. All of these changes facilitated the transfer of manufacture off-shore.
We tested the resulting prototypes exhaustively to ensure the measurement accuracy and repeatability. This included repeated cycling through the full temperature range of the instrument and through the range of conductivities of the process water, and dismantling and reassembling the prototypes repeatedly to check for weaknesses in the mechanical design. The mechanical testing of the prototype was very successful; however we did discover an unusual electrical behaviour that required some careful redesign and additional testing. At the end of this we were satisfied that we had a product that exceeded the requirement and that could be manufactured in a volume production environment.
The product was up and running with the offshore manufacturer within a year. Opus21 assisted with a few initial teething problems mainly relating to sourcing of materials. These were fully resolved, and having moved to off-shore manufacture we performed a cost comparison with the previous design. The cost savings on the measuring heads were very significant and lead to overall savings that gave a one year payback on the cost of the whole project.