4 Steps to Successfully Customize Tapes

Of course, existing solutions that fulfill the needs are always easier to use and reservations about pursuing a custom product design are understandable. If ordinary is fine for you, you can stop reading here and let others take the lead.

With the right partner providing dedicated processes and in-house capabilities, direct collaboration with technical teams and reliable experience, customizing tapes can be streamlined, cost-effective and successful projects with minimal effort from your side.

And the outcome can pay off in many ways as customized tapes can not only make new developments become reality, replacing traditional solutions, but can save time and money in the long run by streamlining production processes, reducing maintenance efforts, or combining multiple functions in a single product. The values customized tapes provide are big and following proven steps can maximize success rates.

The essence of a customization project starts with understanding your vision and definition of the value a solution can bring and this is where your co-development partner can help. They can help to quickly understand parameters and help establish requirements from your expertise and to narrow down the many options to a manageable selection of possibilities.

The in-depth understanding of the needs, hurdles and requirements becomes the bedrock of the project as your partner uses their know-how and capabilities to propose a solution that will meet your timing, performance and pricing requirements.

Often, a successful Co-development process is aided with evaluation tools in a collaboration session to help ensure that critical items are not overlooked, help to clearly define the expectations, milestones and deliverables. In many projects, this step can lead to significant time reduction in development as new options can come to light through mutual understanding.

Once understanding and expectations are established by all parties, customization projects are ready to be kicked-off with the creation of samples to ensure the project flows quickly. At this stage, the most promising options are chosen from available materials and technologies for first sampling, typically on pilot machinery or through small scale rapid prototyping.

In some cases, samples may be fabricated in a very short window, or in others it may take a bit longer, depending on the complexity. Often, the early samples are used to validate the understanding of the application needs and to ensure a project is on the right path.

The samples provide valuable feedback on your needs and can be adjusted based on your or your valued customer’s feedback. A good development partner can give an estimate of how smaller scale validation samples might differ from larger volume work on the production equipment.

If feasible, evaluation under realistic application conditions can often ensure success in selecting the most promising options or to providing feedback about the parameters that need to be further modified. This stage allows for quick investigation of solutions to further narrow down the section to keep your timelines on track and build confidence.

Based on the test results of the sample phase, the project enters trial phase where the first materials are produced under real production conditions, but at lower volumes, as the parties involved ensure that all the parameters have been properly accounted for.

Typically, this phase has few, if any, changes but there may be small changes needed to optimize processing or ensure a seamless experience for you or your customer. Items such as final packaging and production handling are typically reviewed at this phase in the project.

Depending on the complexity of the innovation, several runs may be done before the solution officially moves from the production phase, but often the results are used in viable products. In the trial phase, it is critical to ensure robust testing of any relevant parameters under real conditions as well as the examination of commercial feasibility for scale-up production to ensure a mutually successful launch.

The “final” stage is the full production stage, after the solutions have been proven, where the production of larger quantities is carried out on full-scale equipment allowing for further process optimization, in-depth quality controls have been established and the value of the solution is understood.

Solutions may be reviewed from time to time, as innovation carries forward, going back to the start of the process, but with the optimized solution in place it’s time to pop the corks and celebrate another successful project.

With the right partner, customizing tapes can be easier than you might think as they can use their experience and capabilities to suggest novel solutions for your needs. Customized tapes can pay off in many ways and provide competitive advantage or pave the way to new performance levels of next generation applications and equipment.