With this in mind, a small group of four design specialists, headed by principal engineer Damian Harty, has spent the last two years promoting new methods and techniques among Prodrive s engineers and designers. While Prodrive s design activities have long proved outstandingly successful in competition, the designers previously had limited opportunity to test out their proposals prior to manufacture. By giving them easy to use but powerful PC-based software, they are now able to rapidly and accurately assess product quality early in the design cycle when it is easier, quicker and cheaper to make any changes required. This has had a tremendous impact, enabling the design team to achieve a step change in productivity. The Asian client involved had produced a novel design that was both efficient and reduced the maintenance needed on its new model.
Customers expect their purchase to look the part and make the right noises.
So checks must be made to ensure that components like this one do not exhibit unacceptable whine, howl or ringing under normal use. A design audit of the casing at Prodrive looked at its dynamic response over a wide frequency band. This exposed a potential problem on one of the bosses because of inadequate support webbing. To overcome this shortcoming, Prodrive engineers recommended extra stiffening that would add a mere 2oz to the weight of the casing. Accepting this modification, the scooter manufacturer went on to introduce the revised casing and subsequently received rave reviews at the new model s press launch.