Hi All,
This is mainly aimed at Eve employees but anyone with relavent knowledge please do weigh your thoughts in!
So in university this year I have to make a product for the lighting industry with a group of colleagues.
I just wanted to ask here, what are some important documents to have or things to be aware of?
I already have a Gantt timeline for product development over this year and a BOM. I’m aware of Chinese New year being an issue when it comes to manufacturing parts out of china.
Are there any other useful documents I should look at getting, or any advice on timeline things. Basically just want to throw it out to people who have created products before, what are things to watch out for or be aware of?
I know this is very broad so apologies.
Thanks all
I’m no expert in the lighting industry, but I can give you some suggestions based on my experience.
Gantt chart is good, but if it’s still rough, you may try detailing it as the project moving forward.
Important documents
Readiness for each engineering build
It should include all the important factors that could impact your builds. For example, material in house status, machine or fixtures tuning and calibration status, preparatory work for production lines like connecting power and ground, environment cleanness… things like that. Also, you need to set Estimate Time to Close (ETC) for these items and several Check Points (CP) for risky things, so you can keep tracking and quickly react to accidents.
Open Items Tracker/Main Issue List (MIL)
The items that haven’t been decided, issues haven’t been solved (every product will run into issues, no matter it’s design, assembly, or anything else), risks that haven’t been eliminated. Everything you can think of necessary to be documented and tracked needs to be on the list. And you should review it every period until these items are closed.
Build goal
You may set goals for each build, and consider carefully what goals you must achieve in these builds, so you have a clear target during developing stages. The goals could be, for example, build goal – “I need to have the conclusion of the lifetime for this product by doing some duration test.” – and so on. When you finish each build, you should review it again and write down your achievement for every goal.
Design of Experiment (DOE) plan
What are the DOE and validation you plan to do in developing stages, what time it will start and end, how many materials you need, what method you will use, and what conclusion you will get from it… Prepare ahead of time since some validation could take months to finish. You can also check with vendors or suppliers about the documents or reference files they can provide; it can be really helpful.
As for the timeline, it is the most most important thing for a project. It will be best to consider the Chinese New Year and also every little CP, and closely follow up. It will be best also to have good communication with people relative to the project and ensure there is no communication gap between each step.
I hope it helps you. That’s all I can think of right now. If you have more relating questions, I’m more than happy to help.
Hey Kira!
You are a living legend! This is so helpful.
Never thought of doing a DOE plan but that makes complete sense actually.
I may come back to you as the project gets on the move for advice - but once again thank you sooooo much for this detailed response! Its incredibly helpful!
