Assessment Services

The Material Solution offers a well defined service to help you mitigate risk before you invest big dollars in your product launch. Our Design Review Process is a proven 2-day intensive activity that gives your design team an unbiased and experienced opinion on the risks present in the design prior to major investment in tooling and other high cost elements related to production.   Ideally the design review will be conducted when the design is near completion but not yet frozen.  Our experts (typically 2-4 on a team) can apply deep cross-industry experience to make sure you’re not facing any unanticipated surprises. Making the effort to review the design at this stage can provide a fresh perspective which can help prevent the headaches, hassles and brand damage that can come from product field failures. 

The review can also identify alternative design elements, materials and manufacturing processes to reduce product costs either in the initial design or future design iterations in next generation products.  Our experts have reviewed dozens products in a diverse range of industries and that is a powerful source of technology transfer and manufacturing optimization. 

The 2-day Design Review Process has the following elements and typical schedule:

•Day 1 (a.m.) Design Team Presentation

Your design team presents the design to our review team so that we can understand the design intent in detail.  A drawing package or other pre-read materials are often provided to make bring the review team quickly up to speed and to make the review time more productive.  Topics to be presented by the design team include:

       1) Design elements that are new to this product that were not present in previous generation products

       2) Materials of construction with specific emphasis on new materials

       3) Product use scenarios (e.g. typical applications, expected environmental exposure, anticipated users)

       4) Product specifications (e.g. expected lifetime, performance envelope, shelf life, regulatory compliance, shipping conditions)

       5) Anticipated manufacturing processes especially those that may be unfamiliar to you

       6) Testing results with a focus on any testing failures

•Day 1 (p.m.) Interactive Fact Finding Discussion with Questions and Answers

This is an interactive session where our review team has the opportunity to discuss the product design with your team.  We find that it is often necessary to challenge the testing results and other design information to understand what elements of the design represent the greatest risk.  Focusing on the risk elements and developing a risk mitigation strategy is the most powerful outcome the design review.

•Day 2 (a.m.) Review Team Technical Evaluation

At this time the Material Solution review team will meet alone and discuss what we have learned and develop our point of view on the design, its risks, recommended actions and suggested risk mitigation steps.

•Day 2 (p.m.) Review Team Presentation

The review team and the design team will come together for the formal presentation of results, which will typically be in PowerPoint format.  This presentation is intended to give immediate feedback and may lack some required backup information that the review team will provide within 2 weeks in a written report. 


Reduce time-to-market and manufacturing costs
Mitigate potential risks and liabilities
Improve customer satisfaction and brand image