Yosemite Water Fountain

This was the final project associated with the Making Your Products At Scale class I took as a masters student at Carnegie Mellon. The goal of this project was to design a consumer product and create an implementation strategy on how to bring the product to market and scale as demand increases. The key areas of focus for this project, aside form the product itself, were tooling, the bill of materials, the assembly line, testing, and packaging. This was a team project.

Product Overview

Our product is a Yosemite Water Feature. The target audience of this product consists of visitors to Yosemite National Park, and nature enthusiasts around the world. The centerpiece of the product is a crystal-clear urethane casting which is a topographical replica of Yosemite Valley. This piece is supported by a pedestal and is backlit with individually addressable RGB LEDs, which allow the implementation of custom patterns and color schemes. Additionally, a fountain element is added using a small water pump which supplies water to the top of the valley. The water then flows through the valley before returning to a water reservoir. Mirrored acrylic placed on the bottom of the reservoir reflects bottom-mounted LEDs in an aesthetic under glow effect. A small electronics controller serves to distribute power to the pump and control the LEDs. During design, care was taken to ensure minimal assembly times, decreased manufacturing complexity, and improved user experience.

Market Study

To accurately determine the scale and pricing of the product, which highly influenced our decisions in manufacturing, we performed a market study. The analysis presented below is for the following purposes:

Gauge competition in the market to understand product segmentation
Accurately determine the scale of manufacturing to optimize the profits generated
Get an understanding of how changes in the product affect demand, target groups, pricing and product segmentation

We have analyzed that our current product falls under two umbrellas of markets: Gifts, Novelties, & Souvenirs and Home Decor. Further, our target consumers are tourists and people visiting Yosemite National Park as well as people looking for home decorations.

We have further subdivided the market study into the following sections, where we try to understand the state of the market.

Market Size

Market size is defined as the number of business units or customers that are considered in your potential market. For example, a big market could be saturated and require you niche down more specifically, whereas a smaller market could mean there’s lots of opportunity for new businesses. This category (decorative objects and souvenirs) is currently focused by huge corporations such as Target, Wayfair, Ikea, and also by small run businesses. Therefore exploring this space is a good idea.

Market Value
- Souvenir: ~20 billion USD CAGR 3.2% forecast till 2028
- Home Decor: ~720 billion USD anticipated to reach 940 billion USD by 2027 (US accounted for 38% of the market) where decorative lighting and furniture approx. 13.75 billion USD. CAGR - 6% forecast till 2027
Market Demand
- Souvenirs: Generally, it is observed that 66% of the tourists visiting a place buy souvenirs related to their trip. Given the number of tourists visiting Yosemite National Park which is around 3.5 Million per year, the potential market for our product becomes huge from the souvenir aspect.
- Home Decor: As more and more millennials start to buy homes the demand for all sorts of home furnishings will rise, the industry is expected to see an annual increase by 5.5%
Market Competition
- Most individual sellers are selling custom water features on Etsy
- No large-scale manufacturer or distributor like Ikea is selling a product like this
- Most of the novelty and souvenir stores don’t have similar products, so no direct comparison
- Very few home decor water features serve as a souvenir for a particular landscape

Given the aforementioned factors regarding the different aspects of the product and the market, we have concluded that we will use an initial scale of 600 units/month and a price of around $90 to $100.

Tooling

In this section we will show how the tooling will change as we scale up from 10 units/month (the scale at which we built our prototype), all the way to 1000 units/month (the maximum potential scale according to our market study).

Takt time was calculated assuming an 8 hour work day. The formula for calculating urethane casting labor time is T=(30+2*p)/p min, where p is the number of units produced per day. The formula for calculating urethane casting total time is T=(16*60)/p min.

At a scale of 600 per month (20 per day), we essentially are at the upper limit of the production quantity viable for casting. Casting more than 20 molds per day would be difficult and very time consuming. Although casting minimizes tooling cost due to the fact that urethane casting only requires a single 3D printed male mold, and several silicone female molds, both of which are very cheap, at a scale of above 600 units per month we would need to make the transition and investment to injection molding.

Here are the tooling charts:

After deciding on our tooling for various scales we decided to explore Cycle Time and Labor Time as scale increases. These charts can be seen below, note we are using a log scale. At a scale of 10 per month, 3D printing the base and tower was the bottleneck, so we eliminated that by switching over to casting. Then, at 600 per month, casting became the bottleneck. We eliminated that by switching over to injection molding, understanding that this change would require a high capital investment.

Bill Of Materials

For our bill of materials, we first determined the necessary components. This was achieved by conducting a full-scale prototype at the 10/Month scale. An image of all the product components is shown below. From here, we figured out changes in materials associated with the change in Takt time as our scale increases to 600/Month. The different BOM's are shown below. To minimize MUDA and follow just-in-time practices, maximum lot sizes are roughly chosen based on consumption of 1 months worth of production. Thus, minimal inventory is required to store purchased materials. At higher scales, wholesale retailers are to be used to minimize costs and waste associated with retail or smaller scale packaging. The costs associated with these shipments are approximated using wholesale sites such as Alibaba. Note that a further reduction in prices may be possible by avoiding posted prices and instead working directly with distributors and producers. Significant cost savings are realized by using a purpose-built PCB. This allows us to eliminate the need for discrete electronic components. Those listed on the Bill of Materials represent the main drivers of cost for the PCB components.

Components at 10 per month

BOM at 10/Month

BOM at 100/Month

BOM at 600/Month

Assembly Line

Before describing our manufacturing plant layout, it is important to discuss the assembly cycle time of our product. Based on our market study, we need a 24 minute takt time in order to meet customer demand. After figuring out how to optimize the assembly of our various product components, we were able to achieve a total cycle time of 14 minutes per unit which means we will be able to meet customer demand at a scale of 600 units per month. Shown in the table below is a breakdown of the assembly cycle time for each of our major product components. This results in a per assembly labor of 14 minutes. From the tooling section, the per unit fabrication time is about 11 minutes per unit, resulting in a total labor time of 25 minutes per unit. Assuming a labor cost of $20 per hour, the unit labor cost is $8.33. This brings the per unit cost, including labor, to $42.19.

The way we were able to minimize the above cycle times is by implementing a lean manufacturing environment shown below.

Starting with the top left area of our production floor, we have our tooling zone. This area is where we will have our SLA 3D printers for creating the male feature pieces that are then used to produce our feature molds. Our mold manufacturing will also happen in this tooling zone and once a mold is complete it will be moved to the casting stations. We have two separate casting stations in our production plant. The first station is where we will cast the crystal clear feature, in this project case it was Yosemite. The second casting station is where the tower and base pieces are made. Finally, the last station where parts are produced in house is the laser cutting station where the mirrored acrylic that sits in the bottom of the base is cut. For the parts that are made in our production facility, there are quality control points where the parts need to pass an inspection. This process will be discussed in more detail in the testing part of this report.

The middle section of our production floor is where the actual product assembly takes place. There is a materials bay that holds all of the parts made in house, and there is a consumer off the shelf (COTS) area that has all parts ordered from outside manufacturers. Our assembly area is separated into a feature assembly station that handles our centerpiece feature, tower, and base, and an electronics assembly station that works on the LEDs and water pump. Due to the fact that there are 17 different product pieces that need to be assembled, we have incorporated poka-yoke into our design to help reduce assembly mistakes. An example of this can be seen below where there is an asymmetrical acrylic piece that will therefore only fit in the base in one orientation.

Once our product is fully assembled it enters the testing area of our production facility located in the bottom left hand corner of our plant layout shown above in Figure 4-1. This is where all the final product testing takes place. These procedures will also be discussed in the testing section of this page. Assuming that our product passes the testing phase, it moves into the packaging area where it is boxed and sent to the stock area for shipping. The packaging will also be further discussed in the packaging section of this page.

Testing

Since our product falls under the decorative category, we especially need to have high quality standards. Moreover to reduce muda and efficiently manufacture the water feature, we have added quality inspection sections along with the final product testing in our assembly layout. The quality inspection first takes place in the goods receiving section, where we receive and store the COTS parts, then a quality inspection station is followed by each of the manufacturing stations namely: Structure Casting Station, Acrylic Cutting Station and Feature Casting Station. Additionally, we have added an intermediate quality assurance step during the main assembly process, where we verify the electronics sub-assembly by testing the pump and the LED strip connections. Finally, after the completion of the assembly we have a final product testing station. We have come up with four testing procedures that we need to verify during the manufacturing of our product.

Leak and Splash Testing - We do a leak test after the pump and electronics are assembled into the base and tower. The test is performed by filling water into the base and then inspecting any leaks. The splash testing is done during the final testing where we turn on the pump and check for any splashes resulting in water coming out of the water feature. If this were to happen we would adjust the pump flow rate.
Dimension and Tolerance Check - As discussed previously in the parts that we manufacture, we have an inspection for the dimensions where we need the manufactured components to stay under the designed tolerances.
Electronics Testing - This is a visual inspection, where we turn on the electronics and verify that the LEDs and the pump are connected correctly and working properly in the assembly.
Final Product Testing - The final product testing consists of verifying the working condition of the complete water feature, dimension checking, and LED pattern testing.

Quality check of each product would be optimal, however, at a large scale is not efficient. Therefore, we use a sampling strategy for testing and follow the standards of AQL (Acceptance Quality Level). AQL is a widely used standard for quality assurance and the AQL number stands for allowed percentage of major defects in a batch. Also, AQL standard tables can be referred to in order to calculate the number of samples that need to be tested in a batch to maintain the AQL. For our product, we use different testing strategies for different sections of our manufacturing process.

Incoming Product Inspection & Final Inspection - AQL 0.15 Inspection

We use this sampling strategy for the incoming raw materials, COTS, and the final products. According to the AQL standard we sample 50 samples in every batch given our batch size in between 500 - 1000.

In Process Control: We use continuous testing for maintaining the quality of components during manufacturing. It comprises of two phases: screening and sampled testing. Screening stands for checking every sample until the manufacturing processes have stabilized. Once the outputs of manufacturing stations are above a quality standard, we switch to sampled testing as mentioned in the previous point.

Packaging

Packaging is one of the first touch points for a consumer when it comes to experiencing a product. Being a product inspired from a natural landmark, our aim was to keep the packaging minimal as well as sustainable without any non-biodegradable materials in order to minimize waste. Further, to provide the user with a great overall experience of the product, the unboxing itself should be easy and hassle-free. At the same time, as the product would be shipped through e-commerce distribution channels, packaging also needs to be sturdy and strong enough to keep the product safe, especially with our centerpiece having some delicate features.

Therefore, our box and packaging consist of three parts, the outer box, inlay, and honeycomb packing paper which are all made out of paper. Throughout the packaging no glue or adhesive is used, and a minimal amount of plant-based glue is used to stick the honeycomb packing sheet to the lid.

The product package contains three things:

The fully assembled water feature
Power Cable and adapter
Documentation (Instructions and Quality Certifications)

All the contents of the package are held together safely with a single folded inlay of cardboard, keeping the packaging minimal. On the inner surface of the lid, we have attached a sheet of honeycomb packing paper to protect the delicate features of the centerpiece and dampen any vibrations that may arise during shipping.

Also, to keep the aesthetic and the branding on the box minimalistic, we etched a vector of the landmark, Yosemite, on the box as shown below.

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