Innovation on a time limit

The brief

Del Mar Reynolds is an innovator in cardiac diagnostic solutions. They wanted our help to develop a new, easy to use ambulatory ECG recorder and docking station to interface with their current PC driven software. And they wanted it ready for launch at the American Heart Association exhibition, which gave us six months. 

What we did

Immediately, we agreed upon a carefully risk managed project plan - DMR would focus its efforts on the cardiac monitoring electronics while we would design, prototype, engineer and manage the outsourcing of all component manufacture. Within 2 weeks, design concepts were presented for all parts of the system. Just over 3 weeks later, engineering development including Finite Element Analysis, tolerance analysis and materials/process selection was completed and 3D CAD files of the system components produced. Potential manufacturing partners were identified, cost estimates obtained and the first set of 18 prototype parts were delivered two weeks later. Following initial assembly and verification testing, it took another 3 weeks to produce 12 sets of fully finished components for verification testing and concurrent usability validation. We then selected manufacturing partners in Singapore and tool design started concurrently with specification for manufacture.

Result

Working together to a carefully risk-managed project plan so we could run several activates in parallel meant the system was launched successfully, and as planned, at the AHA exhibition on November 11th 2006.

Client's Comments

"PDD met the tight timescales imposed on this project and we have developed a good working relationship with them… PDD have both a realistic and pragmatic approach to planning and implementing a project and quickly identified risk areas during the initial consultation meeting. We were also impressed with the processes PDD implemented in finding suitable manufacturing partners for the Evo mouldings, enabling us to select the best sub-contractor for the job."