In this series we'll explore some of the methods, stories and culture we have at Inertia for getting products to market faster, some of which can be applied to any business out there.

Think about it: the faster you get a product to market, the more income and profit you can generate. It scares the you-know-what out of me that most companies making products don’t yet embrace lean manufacturing, let alone lean product development.

It’s a regular day at Inertia. Inside our meeting room overlooking bustling Bathurst Street in Toronto is a whiteboard covered with ideas, drawings and diagrams. We’re mid-way through our project review session as one of our engineers, the one running the meeting that day, asks for feedback on some potential solutions for overcoming a roadblock in the product development phase.

It seems like 3D printing has become a hot topic in mainstream media as well as the typical engineering and design rags over the past year or two. While rapid prototype technologies (3D printing or additive manufacturing) for (mostly) plastic products seems to be taking the product development and manufacturing industry by storm, we've found that there exists a very real and ongoing need to make prototypes the old fashioned way - through brute force CNC machining and hand-finishing.  Too expensive you say? Well, where you have the part made and what size of part you need to make can drive the decision away from 3D printing in a hurry.

This week I took action on something that has puzzled me on occasion. As part of my work, I review employee expense reports and issue cheques for reimbursement. This is generally a straightforward task - sometimes you have to fiddle with the software settings to adjust a tax rate, but for the most part, it's pretty simple.

What has been puzzling me are the receipts from a large and well-known food services corporation founded by a famous Canadian hockey player (not to name names). I come across several of these every month and the taxes on the receipts never made any logical sense.

I decided to take action and posted some questions on the company website’s on-line feedback form. To my surprise, the next day I received an email from a senior executive of the company. It was a courteous and detailed response clearly outlining the reasons and methodology for their tax calculations - which was largely due to CRA tax regulations.  I was so impressed by the rapid and detailed response to my question that I replied back, thanking the person for his efforts.

In the space of a day, my opinion of this company was changed dramatically. Where I was intially prepared for frustration and disappointment, I was met with refreshing satisfaction.  It's nice to see that customer service does not stop at the cash register and front-line employees, it continues all the way up to the top of the organization.  A good customer service experience should not go without notice.  Thanks Timmy!

Now that’s real world thinking!

At Inertia, we're always looking for ways to reduce waste and give our clients more bang for the buck by getting products to market faster. 

We're looking forward seeing what's new at The Canadian Association of Defense and Security Industry Tradeshow which will be taking place today and tomorrow in Ottawa, ON.  Inertia Engineering + Design will be on hand to view the latest in land vehicles, vehicle seating systems, and soldier safety equipment.

In my career I have experienced many sides of engineering and product development services - as an employee of a design / manufacturing company, as a customer purchasing engineering services, and now as a business owner providing engineering services to other businesses.

No matter what the size and type of company, there are always times when internal engineering teams are stretched thin, do not have the necessary expertise, or are in need of help to complete a product development project.  The challenge, when you are super-busy, is to pull yourself or your front-line managers away to actually get the help they need.

In July 2011, Inertia Engineering + Design spearheaded a project with the support of NRC-IRAP and NSERC’s Engage program to collaborate with IPT Smarter Alloys and the University of Waterloo on a technology commercialization project. Inertia set out to develop a product that could demonstrate the unique benefits of a revolutionary new technology called Multiple Memory Material (MMM).

The MMM technology allows virtually any shape-memory or pseudoelastic material to be programmed with multiple localized shape functions. This advance promises to revolutionize the design of a wide range of products, such as medical devices, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), printers, hard drives, automotive components, valves, and actuators.

After a ton of blue-sky-white-boarding madness, we threw a dart and ultimately chose to design an anti-scald valve. Since it’s always easier to communicate how a technology works in a real product, we selected a baby bottle as a demonstration product.  The idea is that if you over-heat milk in a baby bottle, the valve closes, preventing your baby’s mouth from being burned. Once the milk cools down to a reasonable temperature, the valve re-opens and milk can flow. And here is the elegant part of all this; there are no batteries, no motors – it’s all done by the heating of a 30mm long piece of 400 micron Nitinol wire that has been treated with the MMM proprietary process. Traditional shape-memory alloys are also able to actuate a mechanism but cannot return it to the original position without using a bias return spring or outside force to do so. The MMM mechanism is a passive, self-sensing, self-actuating, and self returning system.  How cool is that?

Inertia worked with IPT Smarter Alloys to develop a product development process specifically for MMM mechanisms.  In doing so, Inertia designed, engineered, prototyped and successfully tested this baby bottle anti-scald valve.  

Inertia relied on its non-linear structural finite element analysis (FEA) capabilities to simulate and predict the behavior of the Multiple Memory Metal wire in order to quickly iterate on design concepts, select possible concept paths and, ultimately optimize a design for a wire mechanism that would both actuate and reset a rotary valve.  

Once a mechanism was designed and simulated, CAD models were generated for the valve mechanism and rapid prototyped using 3D printing technology.  After running through two product development cycles (design, engineer, prototype, test) we successfully achieved a functional proof-of-concept MMM-actuated anti-scald valve for a baby bottle.

Inertia’s previous experience with designing and engineering pioneering products such as the first crash-energy-absorbing child car seat and the first low-floor battery-electric delivery truck made this project a perfect fit for our capabilities because we have developed some great expertise and strategies for navigating the product development process to ensure successful technology commercialization.

At Inertia, we've had great success over the years improving collaboration, productivity and concurrent engineering practices by implementing a PDM (Product Data Management) system which allows us to share, control and automate our CAD files.  Using our realworldthinking, we asked ourselves; if PDM can help to eliminate waste and improve quality in a product development CAD design environment, why not also apply it to our office documents to help lean-out our business processes and reap similar benefits of: