The Purpose of FPrin’s Design Services
We work with medical device companies to help them with device development. We provide engineering and design services to help clients bring their products to market in an efficient, risk-managed, way.
A Little About FPrin
We are a group of engineers who are passionate about designing medical devices. We believe that by using a knowledge driven approach to product development we can speed up the development process, while simultaneously realizing a better product
Does This Sound Like You?
You value a development process where schedule, costs, and outcomes are predictable. You value quickly getting to a design that will work, versus one that might work.
Why are FPrin’s Design Services Needed?
At FPrin we have developed methods to address product development in a risk managed way, focusing on getting to designs that will work, not designs that can work. Our clients typically have one or more of these three issues. Does this sound like what you are experiencing?
1. You keep coming to dead-ends in product development because you don’t have a good way of vetting conceptual designs. Because of this you often go over budget and miss critical schedule milestones.
2. Because you don’t have a good process for making good, data-driven, design decisions you spend too much time and money guessing, building, testing, and iterating.
3. Because you don’t have a model-based understanding of your system, you have a hard time knowing how to interpret test data and fall into a “test-to-success” mindset which often does not converge in a way that meets functional, schedule, and budget objectives.
Our Work Focuses on These Three Practices
1. Identify risks early and address those risks using model-based methods. This reduces iteration in prototypes and hard to control spending later in the project.
2. Validate models and system performance throughout the process. This enables quickly identifying issues and allows us to quickly pivot and avoid or work around technical challenges.
3. Collaborate closely with the client to deliver what meets their needs, not what we want.
What Can You Expect to Gain From Working with FPrin
You will gain a thorough understanding of your system and where there might be pitfalls.
You will have confidence that your product will work and will be robust and manufacturable.
You will reduce your time to market and save money in the process.
What Does FPrin Help You Avoid
By using Knowledge Driven Product Development, we avoid wasting time and money. We use appropriate modelling to inform the design, which leads to fewer physical iterations, reducing cost and supporting design convergence within the schedule. This approach also helps to ensure that the final design is robust and gives confidence that there isn’t a hidden problem that might appear at some point in the future (for example, well into manufacturing).
How Do We Work with Our Clients?
We work collaboratively with our clients, holding regular meetings to share project status, get input and share progress, data, and designs. We start by understanding the technology and the client and customer needs. This is usually done by developing requirements in collaboration with the client. Next, we identify risks to achieving a successful, robust, design that meets the requirements. We then retire risks by building simple models and doing simple experiments to inform the design – tackling risks according to priority. We use these models to de-risk the design prior to building physical system prototypes. We then verify these models using appropriate fixtures to identify any remaining risks at the subsystem level. Finally, detailed design work – still using knowledge gained from the analytical models to inform the design – is completed at the component and sub-system level and integrated in the final product. We build and test components and sub-systems before the final product is built and tested.
What is Special About Our Work?
We don’t rely on wishful engineering. If we have an idea we test it, efficiently and with the goal of a product that works every time. We develop an understanding of the design robustness and sensitivity to variation in inputs or use conditions.
How is Our Approach Different
We believe that it is better to design and test virtually – using analytical models, supported by simple tests – rather than physical prototypes. We use those learnings to refine the design prior to implementing a physical embodiment of a system. This saves time and money compared to prematurely building physical prototypes and pursuing a challenging build-test-iterate process.
What are Our Services Not?
Our services do not typically include high-volume manufacturing – although our designs are optimized for it, and we are adept at prototyping using high volume methods. We understand manufacturing and what is needed for a robust design to enable high-volume manufacturing, but our core skills lie in getting an idea from concept to DVT readiness and transfer to manufacturing.
Next Steps
Contact us with your ideas or present us with your technology or product development challenges. We love talking about technology and product development and would be happy to discuss how we can help make your idea a reality, or solve your most difficult technology and product development challenges.
