From Napkin Sketch to DIN Rail Assembly: Agility’s Iterative Engineering Process

Success Stories

INDUSTRY:

Industrial Equipment

APPLICATION:

Electronics

PRODUCT:

DIN Rail Assembly

Background

Agility EMS has progressed to the design verification stage of an exciting project for one of our customers. We’ve taken the design of a new DIN rail assembly from napkin sketch to prototype to the design verification stage component that will provide power to heavy-duty industrial machines.

Our customer is an OEM manufacturer that produces sophisticated, large-scale industrial machine equipment. Agility has worked with this manufacturer for a number of years. Recently, the company approached Agility for help designing a DIN rail for one of its new industrial machines.

Challenge

The largest challenge we faced in designing the DIN rail was that we were starting from scratch. The customer provided us with a hand-drawn sketch of what how they wanted to organize the components of the DIN rail. This sketch kicked off the Agility EMS engineering process. Agility and the customer’s engineering team met weekly to fine-tune the design, and move from design through prototyping and testing into development.

Solution

Through our iterative process with the customer, Agility took the napkin sketch and refined the design into a workable prototype. We recreated the sketch in SolidWorks so the customer would have a control drawing to work from. This file became a workable document for the company, just one of the value-added services we offer at Agility.

Working with the customer’s engineering team, we refined the design and worked through the prototyping stage to develop a DIN rail assembly the company could test in the field. Currently, we are completing 35 DIN rail assemblies for design verification testing. The company will test these parts in the field, then we will make refinements before we put the DIN rails into production.

Result

We’re looking forward to putting the DIN rail into production next year after the design verification testing is complete. The customer was impressed with our iterative process and how the Agility team worked alongside them to develop the ideal solution for their industrial machine. Because of their positive experience with us, the customer is also having us build the power panel that this DIN Rail Assembly goes into as well as sending us more work on different projects.

Success Stories