The Importance Of Design For Optimizing Plastic Manufacturing Costs

The global plastics manufacturing industry is highly competitive and often riddled with cost and time challenges. It’s important to avoid delays and reduce risks associated with costly design changes so that products get to market quicker than competitors.

In the pursuit of profitability, manufacturers have blurred the line between development and production. Today, designers are an active part of the plastic product manufacturing process. Manufacturers credit design as the leading factor that contributes towards reducing manufacturing costs.

The importance of choosing the right design

The design process for plastic products focuses on the desired aesthetic qualities, functionality, and regulations that have to be met. The design will be created in such a way that it solves a problem, making the product useful for its intended role.

To begin with, design considerations help choose the right plastic material. To come up with the right design, manufacturers have to pick plastic that:

• has the right thermal stress and chemical resistance to meet the product’s design goals and applications
• can be welded and combined with mechanical fasteners
• can be brought to the desired gloss and smoothness as per specifications
• meets the manufacturer’s budget

Ensure that your team comes up with designs that are within your manufacturing capabilities. This will make life easier for your business during the production phase.

Also, ensure that designs are accurate and complete. This helps prevent any last-minute changes halfway through the production phase. Ensure that the design’s quality is top-notch because this will have a direct say on the final product’s quality. A poor design will result in inferior products that cannot compete with the offerings of competitors.

You could opt for approaches such as Design for manufacturability (DFM) which considers the entire manufacturing phase while designing a product. This ensures that the chances of producing a top-notch product are very high.

Here are some more tips for the design phase:

• Keep the designs simple so that it’s easy to manufacture. Avoid complex designs that are difficult to produce
• Consider how the product will be manufactured in the assembly. Will the assembly process be efficient and without errors when the design is implemented?
• Choose plastic material that’s cost-effective and easy to work with

Hope this article helps you create the perfect product designs that are friendly for the manufacturing stage. This help to avoid complexities later during manufacturing and ensures that the final product is of the highest quality.

To learn more about saving costs through design, head over to PLASTIVISION 2023, which will be held from December 7 to 11, 2023 at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, Goregaon, Mumbai. You will get to learn more about end-to-end manufacturing processes, including how to get the design phase right. Contact us at 022 6777 8846/48 / +91 99303 55494 or sanjeevani@plastivision.org to be a part of the event.