In this instructional video, Ian Peterman explains why manufacturing lead times are inherently variable and outlines the key factors that influence how long it takes to bring a new product to market. He emphasizes that timelines are a "moving number" due to variables such as material type, part count, geographic distribution of manufacturing and assembly sites, and available funding. For each factor he describes its impact on schedule, offers practical mitigation strategies, and provides concrete ballpark estimates ranging from a few weeks for simple items (e.g., a mechanical pencil) to several months for complex, regulated, or highly customized products. He also notes the role of shipping and seasonal effects, and cautions that while additional funding can accelerate certain steps, it cannot overcome fundamental physical or regulatory constraints. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to subscribe and a brief promotion of the Peterman Design Firm.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, and today I want to talk about how long it takes to manufacture a new product. And, you know, before I jump into the factors of what will determine how long it is and you know, what, what some estimates are on it, I want to first talk about why it's a moving number. You know, it's, it's something that we definitely button down as much as we can, but how long it takes is almost always a little bit of a moving number because there's so many variables that go into developing a product. It's part of why the R&D budget for companies is often A very large portion of their expenditures is time, and both money are spent in large amounts in order to develop a new product and then get it manufactured. And manufacturing process itself will take different amounts of time, sometimes based on the season. So, you know, people are on vacation more during certain times of the year. There's more production happening during certain times of the year for certain types of products. Whether it's based on, you know, a season that the products are actually launched in or something else. There's a lot of variables that go into affecting the actual time it'll take to manufacture a new product. Of course, once you have a product that's already going and you're just producing it, then your numbers start to become a lot more stable and you're able to really predict exactly, okay, well, we know it's going to take X number of weeks or an X number of months or days, whatever that is going to be. You're going to know because you've done it enough times. You can average out or give yourself a little bit of buffer and say, well, it always takes three weeks and maybe a couple days, so we'll say four weeks. And that's how you know your number. That's how long it's going to take us to make this next batch. So moving into you know how long it takes and what those factors are. Types of material absolutely will impact how long it takes to get your new product manufactured. Certain materials are just harder to work with. They're harder to acquire. You know, there's not as much of it either, either in cost and availability. So the cost is higher, but also sometimes it just takes longer to get a certain material to a certain location where you're actually having it manufactured. And, you know, of course that can be changed and adjusted by your manufacturing being closer to your source or by fluctuations in production of raw material. But your type of material will always really impact your manufacturing timeline, sometimes to the point of where that material will cause enough of a delay where I've been a part of projects that we then redesign the product in order to use a different material because of delays associated with with the material that might have, you know, worked for the last few years, but now due to global supply and demand is not a good fit anymore for how quickly they want the product to be produced. Next part that's going to impact your time for manufacturing is number of parts. The more complicated it is, the longer it's going to take, the more assembly time is going to be required, and the more you're going to have to work through quality control and having parts and components potentially shipped between locations. And so being aware of that will give you an idea of, you know, is this going to be a shorter manufacturing process or a longer one? Obviously, if you can, you can manage to be one of the companies that has a one-part product, fantastic. Your manufacturing time is going to be Drastically shorter than even a component level of, say, 10 parts in a product, you're going to be a lot faster than that. And so, you know, if you're looking at a complexity of, oh, I have a product that has 1,000 parts in it, you're obviously going to be in this much longer time to manufacture process. That said, you know, you can mitigate some of that with having congruent assemblies happening. You know, you're assembling this half over here and this half over here at the same time, and then you assemble them together rather than, you know, just in a line doing it. So there's ways to impact that positively. But as a general, like, rule of thumb, you look at that and you say, okay, well, this is, this is a 1,000-part product. We need to assume this is going to be a longer process. I briefly mentioned it, but number of locations is a big factor, especially when the distance between those locations is large enough where you're not just going to quickly drive between the two of them. And so when you're manufacturing and you have, you know, manufacturing in China and South America and assembly in the United States, and its distribution is actually in Europe where you're going to sell it to Germany, you're going to be shipping things a lot between those places. So even if you do air freight, which is very expensive, especially crossing an ocean, you're going to be looking at a long lead time. So understanding, you know, where is your end customer, where is the end user, and how many places does your product have to go to to get fully assembled? So Things like your packaging getting manufactured in one country and your product in another and then assembled, assembled in a third, you're going to have a shipping time for all of that to happen, and that will really impact how long it takes you to manufacture your product. The last thing I want to talk about is funding, and of course you can make things go quicker if you have more money to invest and to speed things up. You can pay for overtime, you can do things that will allow something to move more quickly through the manufacturing process, but there's a limit to how well that works and how far money will actually get you. There comes a point where there's no amount of money that will actually move something faster than it is at that point. And so be aware, funding is always great. You as As much as you can have and that makes sense is good, but it will not always convert into speeding a manufacturing process up. So now that I've talked about all those, I want to give you some ballpark ideas of how long it actually takes to manufacture a new product. So something that's really simple, thinking about like a mechanical pencil or even a keyboard, You know, you're, you're talking about a matter of weeks between the time that you decide that you order to the product potentially be delivered to your floor, wherever that is, you know, whether it's distribution somewhere, you know, you can have these really short timelines of a few weeks. Most products you're looking at, say, 2 to 6 weeks for production, not including shipping. So that's where, you know, you could produce it. It may take 6 weeks to produce in your country, but you can get it— production, the actual manufacturing process will take only a couple weeks, but then shipping will take 4 weeks. So you might end up being the same speed whether you do it in your country or not. And that's just, you know, an example. But larger products, so when you're talking about especially complicated products that have a lot of testing, that have you know, things that require certifications and regulations are involved and regulatory bodies need to sign off, manufacturing can end up taking months in order to produce a product. And that's the case as well with really highly custom products. So I've been involved with products that, you know, customization, it maybe takes 4 weeks to produce one of the product normally, But with customization, it could take 8 weeks. And so there's a wide range. And, you know, I can keep giving out examples of, oh, this product takes about this long to produce. But in the end, it's all, you know, if you take a look at the variables that I just went over, you know, types of material, number of parts, how many locations are involved. how much funding you have and whether you're able to pay for some expedited work. That's gonna give you a better idea. And range for products typically is a week or 2 on the low end for producing and getting it to you, to months, 6 or more months in order to actually get it produced and in your hands. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how to gauge how long your product is going to take to be manufactured and just giving you a ballpark of whether this is a long process, we're talking months, or we're talking weeks in order to produce your product. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.
