Paul Dunleavy, Vice President of Engineering

 Cogmedix is pleased to announce our new medical device engineering services highlighting DFcx™, or Design for Compliance and eXcellence. This article, which explains design for excellence, is a follow-up to my previous blog on design for compliance.

A common acronym you may have heard is “DFM,” which stands for Design For Manufacturing. When requesting DFM services, you are requesting engineering services catered specifically to simplifying the manufacturing process. In “DFX,” the “M” is replaced with an “X” as a broader placeholder for different design objectives. We believe our OEM medical device customers require and deserve broader design goals than just manufacturing; they deserve excellence!

Cogmedix’s Design for Excellence includes Design For:

    • Manufacture and Assembly – We design with the part’s manufacturability and assembly in mind. Cogmedix’s core manufacturing competency carries into our engineering philosophy and way of thinking.
    • Quality – From decades of experience, our seasoned engineers design with quality throughout the product and process. Cogmedix’s Quality Policy begins with “supply results that meet or exceed mutually defined expectations”.
    • Performance – Our stringent process guarantees our design outputs will meet your design inputs. Two major portions of the inputs are performance and functionality. We strive to make your product the best in its class.
    • Reliability – We design and manufacture reliable, complex medical devices that can have a profound impact on one’s health. Reliability is validated through highly accelerated life tests (HALT) and highly accelerated stress screening (HASS).
    • Serviceability – We design in a modular, serviceable fashion to simplify the execution of preventative maintenance and make it easy to service the system in the field or through depot repair.
    • Safety – We design for safety to ensure all operators and patients are safe. We identify potential safety considerations through a risk management process (RMP) that incorporates risk hazard analysis (RHA) and design failure mode and effect analysis (DFMEA).
    • Test – Testing is a key part of manufacturing. We perform functional and acceptance testing on all of our products. We identify and design for critical in-process and final testing through test protocols and test fixtures.
    • Cost – We design cost-effective solutions by collaborating with our suppliers and reviewing designs for manufacturability and cost. While we first focus on achieving the above objectives, we always strive for economical solutions to position our customers for success.

Cogmedix and Columbia Tech, along with our Referral Alliance Network (RAN), provide world-class engineering talent that is relevant to each customer’s product development needs. To further our capabilities, we extend our engineering services team through our RAN partners, a group of highly respected companies that offer specialized services Cogmedix does not directly provide. Our goal is to make our customers successful by assembling a team that can achieve their needs.

Our mission each day is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts when collaborating with our innovation client base. Chris Coghlin

Although this blog speaks to product design, keep in mind that we can help you at any stage of the product life cycle. If you are ready to start manufacturing, check out Derek Fournier’s blog on manufacturing readiness. Derek Fournier is a member of Cogmedix’s program management team.