Product Safety

Safety is often an overlooked aspect of good product design. When compromises and oversights are made in safe design, the result can be serious injury and impairment for consumers. These incidents often occur with products that have met current standards and regulation for the respective markets and may have been preventable if considered from a new safety perspective.

Rather than defaulting to reactive standards and regulation, Engenium utilizes proactive methods for evaluating and designing safer products. Basing decisions on data, scientific literature, biomechanics, and anthropometrics, decisions are driven by foundational knowledge and are future looking.

The Safety Process

  • Ideation & Concept

    All products start somewhere. It’s best to start product safety where your products do. Products mature from ideas, to written concepts and drawings, to eventually more haptic prototypes. By being customer centric and mindful early on, product safety insights can be quick and invaluable to help direct product design decisions in the following phases of the product lifecycle. Following these phases, a stage gate should be placed and exercised to ensure product safety considerations are understood, communicated, and actionable prior to moving into more costly ventures.

  • Design & Engineering

    After stakeholders approve of the concept, the product moves to the design floor. Here, decisions regarding consumer interactions, materials, appearances, and product functionality are determined and refined. The output should feature intended material and manufacturing partners, their capabilities, pricing, and a design of a product that is manufacturable and able to meet the safety metrics set in the previous stage gate. Prior to investing in final tooling, manufacturing partners produce final engineering prototypes and refine manufacturing process flows.

  • Manufacturing & Assembly

    At this point in the development cycle, significant resources have been invested, so making changes to the product are inherently more costly and difficult. At the manufacturing stage, a trust and verify approach should be used to confirm product compliance to performance goals set earlier in the design stage. Options for manufacturing should center around having optimized assembly, sampling, and audit schemes. The following services can be used in manufacturing refinement and setting active process oversight.

  • Distribution & Customer Feedback

    Following distribution of a product, consumer insights related to perceived uses, product quality, and general customer experiences can be collected, analyzed, and actioned into rolling product changes or continual learning exercises. For example, consumer data from a hazard perspective can be leveraged into refinement of manufacturing or generalized into support for new internal specifications.