Discover how a Product Design Engineer can prevent costly failures with expert metallurgical services. Our team helps you strengthen designs, select the right materials, and solve product challenges before they reach the market.
A Product Design Engineer transforms concepts into manufacturable products by bridging creativity with technical feasibility. They develop specifications, create CAD models, select materials, and validate designs through prototyping and testing. Their role requires balancing multiple priorities: meeting customer needs, ensuring manufacturability, controlling costs, and maintaining quality standards. Product Design Engineers collaborate across teams—from marketing and manufacturing to suppliers and quality control to bring products from initial sketches to full-scale production. The decisions they make during the design phase determine whether a product succeeds in the market or faces costly failures down the road.
While Product Design Engineers excel at conceptualizing and engineering products, they often face a critical gap: materials expertise. Whether you're designing consumer products with metal housings, medical devices with implantable alloys, industrial equipment subjected to extreme conditions, or manufacturing processes that involve metal forming, welding, or heat treatment the metallurgical properties of your materials directly impact product performance, reliability, and cost.
As metallurgical engineers, we support Product Design Engineers by providing specialized knowledge that prevents costly oversights. We help you select the right alloys for your application, predict how materials will behave during manufacturing processes like stamping, machining, or welding, and identify potential failure modes before they occur. We conduct failure analysis when prototypes don't perform as expected, review designs to ensure material choices align with service conditions, and work with your suppliers to verify material quality and processing specifications. Our metallurgical testing and analysis reveal what's happening at the microstructure level information that determines whether your product will meet specifications, pass certification testing, or fail in the field.
The most effective time to leverage metallurgical expertise is early in the design process, before tooling investments are made and production begins. By integrating materials engineering insights during product development, Product Design Engineers can avoid the expensive redesigns, production delays, and quality issues that emerge when material decisions are made without sufficient expertise. This proactive approach combining your design skills with our metallurgical knowledge creates a powerful partnership that transforms potential problems into optimized solutions.
We use a unique approach to help business leaders address engineering issues that lead to high costs, product delays, and manufacturing and supplier quality problems. Also, projects are collaborative – we become part of your team, which enables us to find practical solutions that make sense for a client's business.
Our system consists of three phases: identifying challenges, obtaining critical data, and implement improvements. This detailed, systematic process ensures all steps are covered thoroughly, leading to effective, practical, and sustainable solutions.
Step 1: Review Challenges
Engineers from Industrial Metallurgists meet with clients to review existing challenges. They discuss current issues related to engineering, production, and sourcing, clearly defining what successful outcomes will look like. This collaborative review sets a solid foundation by aligning goals and expectations. This starts with a phone or internet meeting to get background information and is followed by a site visit to get into the details.
Step 2: Identify Solutions
We work closely with clients to identify potential solutions tailored to the client's specific business needs. These solutions are crafted to make sense economically and operationally, ensuring feasibility and effectiveness in resolving identified problems. We will also work together to identify the best path forward. This often includes metallurgical analysis of components or metal stock, discussions with suppliers, and reviewing technical standards and engineering literature.
Step 3: Provide Proposal
The final step of Phase One is delivering a detailed proposal that includes all identified challenges, proposed solutions, required information and data to obtain, and anticipated costs. This clarity enables informed decisions and effective planning.
Step 4 – Gather Data
This step involves collecting the crucial data and information necessary for making well-informed decisions. We ensure that relevant, accurate data—including performance metrics, engineering analyses, and material data—is gathered systematically, providing a factual basis for improvements.
Step 5 – Review Findings
Once data is collected, we review and analyze the findings together with the client. This collaborative approach helps identify precisely which areas need improvement and how best to address them, facilitating consensus and clarity on next steps. We won’t just give you a report and leave it to you to figure out how to use the information to make decisions and fix your problems.
Step 6 – Deliver Report
At the conclusion of Phase Two, a detailed written report is provided. This report summarizes all collected data, outlines clear conclusions drawn from the analysis, and provides practical recommendations for subsequent actions. The report serves as a clear roadmap for future improvements.
Step 7 – Implementation Plan
With insights and recommendations from earlier phases, we collaborate with the client to create a clear and actionable implementation plan. This plan defines specific tasks, timelines, and responsibilities, ensuring the client knows precisely how and when improvements will occur.
Step 8 – Execute the Plan
During execution, the engineering team actively supports the client in implementing improvements. Close collaboration ensures that each aspect of the plan is carried out effectively, translating ideas and strategies into tangible results.
Step 9 – Measure Results
Finally, the implemented improvements are systematically monitored to assess effectiveness. Specific metrics are established to measure the impact clearly. By tracking these metrics, Industrial Metallurgists and their clients can ensure improvements are sustainable, adjustments are promptly made if necessary, and performance continuously improves over time.
Connect with us today to start the process of reducing product development time, reducing materials costs, and reducing costs of poor quality.
Problem: A client needed multiple attempts to pass Underwriters Laboratory (UL) product testing. This resulted in delayed launches.
Solution: We used design reviews and materials testing to assess materials’ reliability. We helped select materials that provided good reliability.
Result: The company’s products started to pass UL testing on the first attempt.
Problem: A client had $16,000 per month scrap cost because of a component fabrication quality problem. The problem was 8 months old.
Solution: We performed a complete failure analysis. Problem samples had alloy composition at the high end of the specification. The incoming tubing composition requirement was reduced. Failure analysis cost was 1/2 the monthly scrap cost.
Result: The problem was permanently fixed.
Problem: Parts were fracturing during a bending process, resulting in 21% scrap rate. This prevented meeting delivery schedules and resulted in high scrap costs.
Solution: Assess the effects of annealing temperature on part microstructure, ductility, and strength. A higher temperature was found that resulted in the best combination of ductility and strength.
Result: The new annealing temperature was implemented. The problem stopped.
Let’s talk about how our proven approach can support your success.
