First of all, I am new to reddit so please let me know if this post should it be somewhere else.
I, myself is not a mechanical engineer nor do I have any related education. Please excuse me if I'm not using the correct engineering language or wrong understanding. I just started carrying a 20yrs+ old family business couple years ago. We sell small rotary device that uses small mechanical parts to transfer horizontal to diagonal movement. Our marketshare has dropped drastically due to product update, so we are currently trying to come up with a new device to meet the market demand. Through out the product development phase, I have gathered and examined most of the popular devices from competitors and I believe I have a good understanding of all the difference, pros and cons of each one of them. We have an in-house engineer located in Taiwan who has been working for us since the company started.
While I was participating in the process, I have noticed a few strengths we are lacking:
- Our development process lacks a lot of updates, such as product research, testing, prototyping, etc. I have involved a lot making design and test suggestion, demanding new tests to be done, providing a documenting system, etc.
- Our engineer team is a two men team, senior engineer is probably a electrical engineer (from my observation) and he does not use computer software to complete tasks. Second engineer mostly does 3D CAD building and I cannot determine what type of engineer he is. A lot of the time I feel they are less motivated of exploring and creating because they never have the urgency of examining competitor products nor exploring new technology. All changes has to be requested.
- Communication has been difficult because of time difference and their way of working. I have integrated Trello in our working environment to keep track of work process and communication.
- Lack of technology is also something I feel missing. I researched and found that CAE, FEA, and MasterCAD will benefit us.
Up until this point, I feel we are still on the right track of development. We have studied what we considered a good design and optimized ours. But since I don't have an engineering background, I always have this doubt of mind that if this is the best design. Should I possibly hire someone here in the US to review or possibly come up with a better design? But we are cutting close to the deadline. (End of January) And we are a small company the limited budget. But again, our company's future rely on this product. Should I hire another mechanical engineer or no? Maybe on project or commission bases? Please share your thought.
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