When a company plans to launch a new product, time is often the biggest pressure. It maybe decide whether your product captures the market or falls behind. A shorter product development cycle means you can respond to customer demand faster, reduce overall costs, and keep competitors at bay.
If you’re a purchasing engineer or product designer, you’ve probably asked yourself this question more than once: how can I turn a CAD drawing into a real, testable product without waiting forever? Here, there are very practical ways to cut weeks, even months, off your timeline. Let’s take a look.
1. Solve problems before they happen: DFM
Here’s something most people discover the hard way—over half of the delays in product development don’t come from production itself, but from design issues discovered too late. You think your drawing is ready, then the supplier comes back with “this cavity is too deep” or “that wall is too thin.” Suddenly, you’re back to square one.
That’s where Design for Manufacturability (DFM) makes all the difference. A good DFM review before you lock the design can save weeks of rework. For example:
- Deep cavities may look fine in CAD, but they require long tool reach, which slows machining and risks tool breakage.
- Thin walls (say 0.5 mm) might seem elegant, but they’re fragile during molding. Adjusting to 1 mm often makes production far more stable.
It’s a bit like checking your car before a road trip—you fix the flat tire at home, not halfway down the highway.
2. Don’t wait for the steel mold: use rapid prototyping and bridge tooling
Another common trap is waiting until a full production mold is ready before you see the first part. By then, weeks or months have gone by, and if the part needs changes, you’re facing even longer delays.
A smarter approach is to move in stages:
- Rapid prototyping: CNC machining or 3D printing can give you a functional sample in just a few days. Even if it’s not the final material, it’s enough to validate fit, form, or even basic performance.
- Bridge tooling: Instead of going straight to a hardened steel mold, start with an aluminum mold. It’s cheaper and faster to make, and you can get dozens or hundreds of parts for testing or pilot runs.
To put this into perspective: a complex plastic housing might take 8 weeks to tool in steel. With an aluminum bridge mold, you could be holding parts in 3 weeks. That’s 5 weeks of head start—enough to run tests, show samples to investors, or even start early marketing.
3. Cut the waiting game with an integrated supply chain
Now let’s talk about something less obvious but just as important: coordination time. Imagine this—your design is done, but your mold maker is waiting for feedback from a machining shop, and the molder is waiting for the mold maker. Every email, every back-and-forth adds days, sometimes weeks.
When all these steps are handled by separate vendors, delays are almost guaranteed. On the other hand, an integrated supplier can run these processes in parallel. For instance, while the mold is being cut, the molding team can already prepare material trials and fixtures.
Here’s a simple comparison:
| Approach | Multiple Vendors | Integrated Supplier (e.g., RJC) |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | Many points of contact, slower | One point of contact, faster |
| Time alignment | Sequential, prone to gaps | Overlapping, parallel workflows |
| Quality | Varies from vendor to vendor | Unified standards throughout |
It’s like preparing a report in an office: if one person waits for the other to finish their part before starting, the process can take days. But when the team works on different sections simultaneously, the report is ready in much less time.
Conclusion: Time is the real competitive edge
At the end of the day, there’s no magic button to make development faster. But by tackling design issues early with DFM, using rapid prototyping and bridge tooling to gain weeks of time, and choosing an integrated supply chain to avoid endless coordination, you can put yourself far ahead of schedule.
At RJC MOLD, this is exactly how we work with clients—fast machining, bridge tooling, and fully integrated injection molding. If you’re staring at a tight deadline, send us your drawings. You might be surprised how much time we can save together. Start your project today.
