Highly Iterative Product Development Within The Tool and Die Making Industry

The tool and die making industry, characterized by single and small series production, sees itself faced with new challenges due to decreasing product life cycles and increasing product derivatization. Therefore tool and die making companies need to shorten their development times and raise their efficiency. Currently tool makers are often still little integrated into customers' processes, which complicates the decrease of development times significantly. To improve the integration, high value-added processes and services need to be offered to their customers to participate in the whole customers' product development processes. Due to the fact that customers still demand constantly high tool's quality, new procedures and technologies are needed in order to achieve an early product maturity. The solution presented in this paper concerns the potentials that can be addressed by using highly iterative product development processes within the tool and die making industry. It includes high frequency optimization, paired with generative manufacturing technologies to ensure a resource-efficient and fast product development process. The usage of modern information and communications technologies (ICT) like tablet-based 3D-visualization will be shown to describe how these products and services in the Internet of Things (IoT) era support decreasing developing times.