Systems Thinking
Manufacture & Scale
13 minStudent plan
Why the design that works on your bench may be impossible to make a thousand of, and what changes when quantity does.
After this lesson you can
- Choose a process that matches the volume
- Cut part count with design for assembly
- Add up a tolerance stack before it bites
One is not a thousand
A prototype can be fiddly. You built it, you know its quirks, and you can spend an hour on the tricky joint.
At a thousand units that hour is five months of labour. Assembly time, test time and the chance of getting it wrong all multiply by the quantity, so decisions that were trivial at one unit become the dominant cost.
This reverses several instincts. It becomes worth adding a component to remove an adjustment step. It becomes worth a more expensive connector that cannot be fitted backwards. A part that requires selecting on test, measuring each one and choosing a matching resistor, is fine once and unacceptable in volume.
In the full lesson
- One is not a thousand
- Design for assembly
- Tolerance stack-up
This lesson comes with the Student plan. The first module of Engineering Foundations is free.