Icona Solutions Introduces Perceived Quality and Cost Optimization Services

The services are designed to help companies improve perceived quality and avoid costly rework.

Supporting all areas of manufacturing, from consumer electronic devices and domestic electrical appliances to automotive vehicles and aircraft, the new services enable companies to review their designs at an early stage to optimize new products and avoid costly rework later in the product development process.

The new services include the provision of experts to work alongside a manufacturer's own team. They also include the provision of qualified engineers to work with a customer, either on-site or off-site using a secure data transfer system.

"High perceived quality is an increasingly significant differentiator for the buying public, as people become more selective in the products and brands that they buy," said Tim Illingworth, chief executive of Icona Solutions. "The challenge for manufacturers, therefore, is to increase the perceived quality of their products without negatively impacting manufacturing costs, while continuing to shorten the design-to-manufacturing timescale. Our new services offering, together with our diagnostic tools, enables manufacturers to gain early insight into the impact of manufacturing variation on perceived quality at all stages of the product development process. This can result in a significant return on investment, with numerous examples existing of companies achieving very effective cost-savings compared with their earlier product development programs and processes."

Offered either on their own or as a precursor to in-process perceived quality services, the company's consulting services provide process mapping to identify and map the processes and data flows used within an organization, as well as tolerance analysis with real-time visualization of the results.