An idea for a new product may look convincing on a computer screen and work perfectly in the laboratory, but this does not yet mean that it will be possible to produce it consistently by the thousand. Between the first successful sample and serial production lies one of the most difficult stages of product creation — the development of the technology for its manufacture.
Suppose a company has developed a new composite material. The required characteristics have been obtained in the laboratory: the strength matches the calculated value, the weight is lower than that of existing analogues, and the raw materials are available on the Russian market. It would seem that one can purchase equipment and launch production. But after the first large batch is made, it turns out that as the volume of the mixture increases, the temperature regime changes, the material polymerizes unevenly, the reject rate grows, and the cost price turns out to be significantly higher than calculated.
These are exactly the problems that the development of production technology for a new product must identify and eliminate. Its task is to turn a single successful result into a reproducible technological process that can be scaled, controlled and used economically in production.
At the same time, solving only the engineering problem is not enough. Before serious investment in equipment and a production line, it is necessary to find out which technologies already exist, which solutions have been patented by competitors, and whether the new process creates risks of infringing the exclusive rights of others.
We will look at how the development of product production technology proceeds — from the initial idea and laboratory tests to a pilot batch, scaling up and serial production.
Where the development of product production technology begins
Development begins not with choosing a machine tool and not with writing a process sheet. First it is necessary to determine what exactly the enterprise is going to produce and what requirements the final product must meet.
Engineers need measurable initial parameters: the purpose of the product, throughput, geometry, strength, accuracy, weight, service life, permissible cost price, requirements for raw materials and supplies, operating conditions. The list will differ for different industries, but the principle is the same: the characteristic “the product must be of high quality” is useless to a process engineer. The indicators must be such that they can be verified.
After that, existing production methods are analyzed. What technological solutions are already in use? What equipment do competitors use? Which processing modes are known? Which materials provide the required properties? Are there patents for similar processes?
This stage is sometimes underestimated. The team immediately starts experimenting and tries to develop the manufacturing technology on its own. After several months it turns out that a similar problem has already been solved in another industry, and the necessary principle is described in detail in a patent ten years old.
Patent information is especially valuable in this respect. In patent documents one can find not only information about right holders, but also descriptions of designs, production methods, material compositions, sequences of operations and technical effects. Therefore, an analysis of the prior art can significantly reduce the number of costly experiments.
At the start, several technological hypotheses are also formed. For example, a part can be obtained by machining, casting, stamping or an additive method. Each option is evaluated by productivity, equipment cost, raw material consumption, quality, scalability and limitations.
Only after such an analysis does the actual process of developing the production technology begin.
Stages of production technology development
There is no single scheme that is the same for a chemical enterprise, a food production facility and a machine-building plant. However, the logic of most projects is similar: first the technology is tested on a small scale, then a pilot batch is created, after which the process is gradually brought closer to the conditions of real production.
At each stage the task becomes more complex. If at the beginning it is important to prove the fundamental workability of the idea, then closer to serial production it is necessary to ensure repeatability of the result, productivity, quality and an acceptable cost price.
Laboratory development of the technology
The first practical stage is laboratory testing. This is where the technological hypothesis itself is verified.
Suppose an enterprise is developing a new protective coating for metal parts. At the laboratory stage, specialists select the composition, application temperature, holding time, surface preparation methods and other processing modes. After each experiment, adhesion, layer thickness, corrosion resistance and other characteristics are assessed.
The main task at this stage is to establish cause-and-effect relationships. What will happen if the temperature is increased by 10 °C? How much does the result depend on the humidity of the raw materials? How does a change in the concentration of a component affect the properties of the product? The number of variables can be large. Therefore, the results of experiments must be systematized, otherwise laboratory work quickly turns into a set of unconnected trials.
As a result, the working range of parameters is determined and a preliminary technological process is formed. But this is not yet an industrial technology. The fact that it was possible to make one high-quality sample in the laboratory must be learned to be repeated.
Creating a pilot batch
The next stage is the pilot batch. Here the technology encounters conditions close to real production for the first time. And it is at this stage that problems are often discovered that could not have been seen on a single sample.
For example, when making a single part, the operation takes ten minutes and causes no difficulties. But if the enterprise needs to produce 500 parts per shift, such a process is no longer suitable. Questions arise about equipment loading, movement of workpieces, quality control, tool wear and organization of workplaces.
The same happens with materials. A laboratory composition weighing 500 grams may behave differently when a batch of 500 kilograms is prepared. Heat transfer, mixing speed, heating and cooling times change. On the pilot batch, not only the quality of the product is checked, but also the stability of production. It is important to obtain the same result not once, but repeatedly. In parallel, the raw material consumption rates, the sequence of operations, equipment requirements, the process cycle time, control points and permissible deviations are refined. These data become the basis of the future technological documentation.
Scaling up the technological process
Scaling up is the transition from laboratory or pilot technology to industrial production. It is not a simple increase of all parameters several times over.
If a laboratory reactor has a volume of 10 liters, one cannot automatically assume that for a 1,000-liter reactor it is enough to multiply all values by one hundred. Heat exchange, hydrodynamics, mixing time and other process parameters will change.
In mechanical engineering, other problems arise. A prototype of a part can be made on general-purpose equipment with a large number of manual operations. Serial production will require a completely different organization of production: specialized tooling, automation, inspection fixtures and an optimized sequence of operations. Therefore, the stages of production technology development must include a check of scalability.
At this stage the configuration of the future production line is determined, equipment is selected, productivity is calculated, the process sheet is refined and possible bottlenecks are modeled. Ideally, industrial implementation begins only after the enterprise understands that the technology provides the required quality at the planned production volume.
How to determine the critical parameters of production
Not all parameters of a technological process are equally important.
Consider the production of a plastic part. The end result may be affected by melt temperature, pressure, holding time, cooling rate, raw material humidity and dozens of other factors. But the influence of each of them differs. The task of the process engineer is to determine the critical parameters: those whose change can lead to rejects or a significant change in the characteristics of the product. For this, the results of laboratory experiments and pilot production are used. The parameters are deliberately varied within certain limits and the effect on the result is assessed.
As a result, instead of a single “ideal” value, a working range is obtained. For example, the process is stable at a temperature of 185–195 °C, but already at 200 °C the properties of the material begin to deteriorate. Such ranges must be determined for all key operations.
At the same time, control points are established. Some parameters can be checked directly during production, others only after the operation is completed. The earlier the system detects a deviation, the less product will have to be rejected. After that, the technological process gradually turns from an experimental technique into a managed industrial system.
How to check a technology for patent clearance
A working technology does not yet mean that it can be freely used. An enterprise may spend several years on research, build a production line and only before launch discover a valid competitor’s patent protecting the technical solution being used. Therefore, it is desirable to carry out a patent analysis much earlier.
It is important to distinguish two questions. The first is whether the technology is new. The second is whether it can be used without infringing the rights of others. These are different tasks.
To assess patent clearance, valid patents are studied in the territories where the enterprise plans to produce or sell the product. What is analyzed is not simply the title of the patent or the image of the device, but the scope of legal protection, which is determined primarily by the patent claims.
Suppose an enterprise has developed a new method of processing a material. Outwardly it may differ significantly from a competitor’s technology. But if the process uses features protected by a valid patent, a patent risk may arise. That is why it is better to carry out the check before the enterprise has invested significant funds in equipment and tooling.
If a potentially obstructing patent is found early enough, engineers can change the technical solution, choose an alternative process, check the legal status of the document or consider the possibility of licensing. In this case a patent search becomes not a formal procedure, but a tool for managing development risks.
How to protect a new technology
There is also the opposite situation. As a result of research, the enterprise really does obtain a new technical solution that did not exist before. Then the question arises: how to prevent a competitor from copying the development? One option is patenting. If the solution meets the established requirements of patentability, one can consider filing an application for an invention or a utility model — depending on the nature of the development. However, not everything should be patented indiscriminately.
Some features of a technological process are more effectively kept as know-how. For example, if a critical mode cannot be determined from the finished product and it is difficult for a competitor to reproduce it without access to the enterprise’s internal documentation, disclosing the technology in a patent may not be the best strategy. In other cases the situation is the opposite. If a new product is easy to examine and the principle of its production is easy to understand, keeping it secret may prove unreliable. Therefore, the protection strategy must be formed already during development. In addition, it is important to record the results of R&D, versions of documentation, test protocols and the contribution of the developers. Intellectual property must be managed as systematically as equipment or raw materials.
If an enterprise first completes the development, brings the product to market, and only then begins to think about protection, some opportunities may be lost.
How “POSINT” helps to analyze existing technologies before development begins
One of the most expensive mistakes in R&D is to spend months creating a solution that has already been developed by someone else.
Therefore, before laboratory experiments it is useful to answer several questions: which solutions already exist, who is engaged in similar developments, which approaches competitors are patenting, how the technology has changed over recent years, and where room remains for a new technical solution.
This requires working with large volumes of patent and scientific-technical information. An ordinary search by a few keywords is often not enough: the same technical principles can be described in different terms, and the needed information can be located inside long patent documents.
Our “POSINT” service uses artificial intelligence to work with such data arrays and helps search for and analyze technical solutions by meaning. This allows an engineer to find relevant patents faster, compare analogues, and study the existing state of the art before costly development begins.
For example, if an enterprise plans to create a new method of industrial water treatment, the search task should not be reduced to the query “new water treatment technology”. It is necessary to study different treatment principles, patents of Russian and foreign developers, technical effects, the materials used, and the dynamics of the emergence of new solutions. Such analysis helps to see the technological field as a whole.
When developing a production technology, this is especially important at an early stage. The engineering team gets the opportunity to understand which approaches are already known, which solutions are protected by patents, and which areas potentially remain free for further research.
“POSINT” can also be used at the following stages of a project: when conducting patent research, searching for analogues, assessing the technical level of a development, and preparing materials for further protection of intellectual property. As a result, patent analytics becomes part of the engineering process rather than a procedure carried out after development is complete.
From a prototype to serial production
Successful development of a production technology for a new product does not end when the first working prototype is obtained. It ends when the enterprise is able to reproduce the required result with the specified quality, productivity, and cost. To do this, it is necessary to go through laboratory development, produce a pilot batch, determine critical parameters, perform scaling up, prepare technological documentation, and test the process under real production conditions. But there is one more stage that is more rational to carry out before all of this — the analysis of existing technical solutions.
The earlier the team understands the state of the art and the patent landscape, the lower the likelihood of spending the R&D budget on repeating someone else’s development or running into patent restrictions right before the launch of production.
Conclusion
The development of a production technology for a new product should lead not merely to a working prototype but to a stable, scalable, and cost-effective process. To this end, it is important to verify in advance the process parameters, the possibility of serial output, and patent risks.
“POSINT” helps, even before the launch of production, to analyze existing solutions, find patents and analogues, and assess the state of the art. This reduces the risk of spending resources on a technology that is already known or legally restricted.
Planning to develop a new product or technology? Use “POSINT” to study existing technical solutions, find patents and analogues, and assess the state of the art before costly testing begins and a production line is built.