## 3 Applicability of the Presented Approaches for Micro Assembly on RMS
### Challenges for Product Development on Micro Assembly RMS  
Many operations in producing micro assembly products have very small tolerances and cannot be done by hand so micro assembly is a highly automated manufacturing process with already existing RMS. Examples for such micro assembly products are optical modules for an endoscopic application that need to be actively aligned during production to ensure proper functionality or special rotary sensors with a very high accuracy. The most micro-assembled products are built for business-to-business rather than consumer sales. The primary goal of the product development process is to foster the utilization of RMS to decrease the investment risk. Operations should be done by using as much existing standard devices and as few newly built special devices as possible. These constraints lead to a set of four different characteristics that are important for the product development in the field of micro assembly.  
* Clear Structure  
Many product ideas in the field of micro assembly are developed during a commission work and are not directly based on marketing or consumer studies by the developer. This fact demands a clear, billable structure for working together with a contracting partner as well as focusing the work on technical problems. For example, when developing and producing a new kind of sensor, a contractor has a set of requirements regarding function, connection and constraints. Any solution fulfilling those is acceptable for the contractor, but it must be delivered in a beforehand set time and budget following a reasonable development cycle containing clear status updates.  
* High Integration of Production especially for Micro Assembly RMS  
Due to the need of high automation, micro assembly lacks the possibility to use manual production steps for operations where no machine or machine module exists. So, if the design of a new product does not suit the already existing standard modules of a micro assembly RMS, specialized modules must be developed and built, which is costly and time-consuming. So, to optimize the use of a micro assembly RMS, production must be integrated in the whole development process. For instance, an RMS owner could possess a manipulation module with which it is possible to move a part in every direction and tilt it by some degree but impossible to rotate the part. In this case the product design must not need the rotation during the production process to be able to use this existing manipulation module.  
* Design for Manufacturability  
In micro assembly, fulfilling customer needs often means documenting their technical requirements and identifying clever solutions to solve them. While this sounds simple at first, it inherits some problems regarding product development. If the technical requirements are very strictly given, there may be only a few possibilities to find a solution for them and those might not easily be implemented on an RMS. This can lead to the situation where the more work the client has already put into pre-designing a potential product, the more expensive its production can get. A possible client should be engaged by the product development approach to get in touch with the development team as soon as possible and with a very rough idea for the product itself to optimize the RMS utilizing possibilities.  
* Time Consumption  
Shorter product lifecycles are an important trend in micro assembly and neighboring industry fields. If a customer needs a new sensor for a technical device that has an annual release cycle, e.g., a new smartphone, the development and production of this sensor must be fast enough to catch up with this annual cycle. The product development process must be fast enough to satisfy the general innovation speed. So, the more time consuming an approach is, the less suitable it is in the field of micro assembly.