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NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders
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Leading from the Front
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Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadership
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Anurag Gupta: Framework to Accelerate NPI
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Kyle Wiens on Why Design Repairability is Good for Business
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Nathan Ackerman on NPI: Do The Hard Thing First
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JDM Operational Excellence in NPI
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Building the Team
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Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production
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3 Lessons from Tesla’s Former NPI Leader
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Maik Duwensee: The Future of Hardware Integrity & Reliabilitypopular
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Reject Fake NPI Schedules to Ship on Time
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Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria
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Screws & Glue: Getting Stuff Done
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Choosing the best CAD software for product design
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Screws vs Glues in Design, Assembly, & Repair
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Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
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Best Practices for Glue in Electronics
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A Practical Guide to Magnets
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Inspection 101: Measurements
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A Primer on Color Matching
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OK2Fly Checklists
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Developing Your Reliability Test Suite
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Guide to DOEs (Design of Experiments)
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Ten Chinese phrases for your next build
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NPI Processes & Workflows
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Production: A Primer for Operations, Quality, & Their Leaders
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Leading for Scale
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Greg Reichow’s Manufacturing Process Performance Quadrants
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8D Problem Solving: Sam Bowen Describes the Power of Stopping
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Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field
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Garrett Bastable on Building Your Own Factory
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Oracle Supply Chain Leader Mitigates Risk with Better Relationships
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Brendan Green on Working with Manufacturers
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Surviving Disaster: A Lesson in Quality from Marcy Alstott
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Ship It!
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Production Processes & Workflows
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Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Tools and Techniques
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Thinking Ahead: How to Evaluate New Technologies
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How to Buy Software (for Hardware Leaders who Usually Don’t)
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Adopting AI in the Aerospace and Defense Electronics Space
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Build vs Buy: A Guide to Implementing Smart Manufacturing Technology
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Leonel Leal on How Engineers Should Frame a Business Case for Innovation
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Saw through the Buzzwords
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Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data
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AOI, Smart AOI, & Beyond: Keyence vs Cognex vs Instrumentalpopular
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Visual Inspection AI: AWS Lookout, Landing AI, & Instrumental
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Manual Inspection vs. AI Inspection with Instrumentalpopular
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Electronics Assembly Automation Tipping Points
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CTO of ASUS: Systems Integrators for Manufacturing Automation Don't Scale
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ROI-Driven Business Cases & Realized Value
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Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
Estimated reading time: · copy linkWatch the full recording of the webinar below.
Watch David analyze a prototype using real Instrumental data below
Instrumental’s cameras and AI can supercharge your manufacturing line’s quality analysis. But to get the most from Instrumental, it helps to design with Instrumental cameras in mind. David Platner, Staff Optomechanical Engineer at GoPro, is a long-time power user of Instrumental technology. David started at – the birthplace of the modern NPI process and originator of the EVT, DVT, and PVT phases—and has watched the evolution of product design first-hand. We got the opportunity to get his perspective on best practices for engineers in NPI, the future of manufacturing, and his creative ideas for how engineers can tweak their designs to make the most of AI technology.
Check out David’s best practices below, and follow along as David analyzes actual data from Instrumental stations.
Really Take Advantage of the Design Phase
“In the design phase, it’s inconsequential to add things, like art colors, adhesive colors, markings, and silk screenings,” David explains. Adding color, markings, and other kinds of visual data (or “Easter eggs”) can help cameras and human operators [identify missing components and misalignments](timestamp to lines on ribbon cables) more easily.
Make Time For Facetime
Early visits to your manufacturer are a great time to talk about your expectations and set them up for success. This is your chance to give them ITC templates and data exit templates, and to figure out what tasks you can automate, like using conditional formatting and rules to flag issues in real time.
Additionally, this is where you can ask for your Easter eggs. Your vendor won’t balk at the request, but they need time because it’s a part of tooling.
Leverage Visual Data
[Whether it’s coloring gaskets](timestamp to recommendation of microphone gasket), [adding centration marks](link to this), or [adding fluorescence to your adhesive and using UV light to find out where your glue ended up](timestamp), using visual flags will help human operators and cameras identify where components’ orientation, alignment, and presence.
Be Strict With Your EVT
If there are issues in your DVT phase, but there are still issues from EVT, you’re not set up for success. Between EVT and DVT, it’s important to stop and reflect: what’s going well, what’s not working, and what can we iterate between this build and do better going into DVT?
Instrumental Keeps Receipts
Instrumental brings traceability and visibility to the line. When you can see immediately that a part is misaligned, it sets your team up for wins. You get immediate value when anyone working in these tools can find and demonstrate issues, especially if it saves them a flight to the factory. “This is good data to have, and a good tool to have.”