Since joining as a contractor in June 2011, he has made himself an indispensable member of the team and has brought valuable new capabilities into the company, and he is bursting with commitment and fresh ideas about how Coalesce can develop. You might think that that’s why we’re so pleased to be welcoming him. However, the reality is that this move will bring to an end months of tit-for-tat ribbing between Paul Mutti and Arron on the relative cultural, financial, and moral merits of being a contractor versus being a ‘permy’.

No doubt they’ll find a substitute topic very soon.

Welcome to the management team, Arron!

We are pleased to announce that Ewen Christie has joined Coalesce as a Mechanical Design Engineer after graduating from Cambridge University with a Master’s degree in Manufacturing Engineering.

Having worked with JCB and Rolls Royce in previous placements, Ewen was a summer student with us last summer and came back during his final year to do a project in partnership with one of our clients as part of his coursework. He did an excellent piece of work so we told him to go out and get a job somewhere else. No, really! If he still chose to work with Coalesce having secured an offer from somewhere else, then we could be sure that he wanted to work with us – we didn’t just want to be any-port-in-a-storm.

Luckily, he understood where we were coming from, wasn’t offended, and insisted he wanted to work with us. We’ll soon drum that out of him!

You can normally rely on Ewen for an amusing comment but when we asked him for a witty quote for this news item, all he said was, “It’s a privilege to be working for a company in which I can get involved with all parts of the design process, while being afforded support and responsibility in equal measures.” Welcome, Ewen!

Tea humour by Jamie Salter, student. 2012. Screen print on t-shirt. 200 x 200mm.

Perhaps more importantly:

• We get to feel all philanthropic about helping new designers gain experience.
• We enrich our network with fresh new designers who may go on to join us when they graduate or even become clients down the line (more on this in our next post).
• We can let them loose on all the things we’d love to be doing but never quite find time for, thus forcing us to progress them.

This year Jamie Salter and Zarmina Shahzad joined us for 8 weeks. Jamie is now in the final year of his MEng in Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University and Mina is starting the third year of her Product Design degree at the University of Lincoln.

Rather than treating students as cheap labour by giving them menial tasks to do, we try to set them a design challenge where Coalesce becomes their client. Our objective is to make the challenge as real as possible. Jamie and Mina’s challenge turned out to be a very real world experience.

Last year’s students had generated various concepts based around the USB interface. One of these was a charging and data cable for micro USB devices such as smart phones that would fit in a credit card slot in your wallet or purse. The idea was that it would be much less likely to be left at home where it can’t help you. We asked Jamie and Mina to pick up the idea, develop it, and produce a prototype. The project was going very well until about half way. Just as the detail design activities were about to get into full swing, Mina discovered an almost identical (though not quite as good) product on Kickstarter.

This situation is similar to that of the submarine patent. Nothing to do with submersibles, a submarine patent is one that evades detection until the day it is published, thus robbing you of the freedom-to-operate that you thought you had so carefully established by patent searching.

Everyone was disappointed. We considered our options and even judged there to be commercial value in continuing with a superior fast-follower product but the kudos of being first had evaporated.

Jamie and Mina went on to help us with a new medical device development (with the client’s approval) so they continued to get valuable professional experience but I can’t help thinking the credit card charger has been the most powerful lesson: with initiatives like Kickstarter now out there, the world of product development may not always be able to wait for the traditionally slow-paced world of intellectual property.

Robin

If you intend to have any kind of online presence, finding a name for your new company can be very difficult, particularly if you want to avoid making up words from scratch or distorting the spellings of existing words. This was the dilemma that faced our founders three years ago.

As is often the case, we ended up going with one of the first names that came to mind: ”Coalesce” (wiktionary definition here). It made sense from a number of different angles. It summed up both the way in which the company formed and the way it wanted to build more capable teams by working closely with others. We are not content with merely consulting for our clients – we’re motivated to transform their projects into successful products so we think it is fitting that our name echoes the convergence of the product development cycle on an end result. An unusual word with a subtle elegance, we hoped it would also reflect some of the qualities that run through the rest of the company and our work.

Of course, being an everyday English word, all of the more obvious URLs were already registered and any acronyms or contortions still available were far too contrived. The simplest solution was to use our registered company name as our URL (www.coalesceproductdevelopment.com) until we could secure something less cumbersome. At the same time we engaged Bison River (www.bison-rivers.com) to help us register our trademark and company logo.

Recently, we realised that our clients, associates and suppliers all refer to the company now simply as Coalesce. This, coupled with the promise of more concise email addresses, made securing a better domain worthwhile. Our preferred domain (www.coalesce.co.uk) was already registered but as far as we could tell had never been used. So we called up Bison Rivers again. With their excellent help and advice, we managed to secure the domain within six months with minimal effort and cost.

We hope you will appreciate our more concise address and wish us luck in spreading the word! You could say it all came together nicely in the end.

OPD drives our methodolgies and influences the relationships we have with our clients and our associates. We’ve written a White Paper which discusses the ideas in more depth. If you have time, please take a look. We’d love to hear what you think.

Coalesce approached Terra-Vac with a concept for an entry level machine which would cater to the single horse/small paddock customer base which is not currently well served. At first Terra-Vac was cautious as it had considered (and prototyped) such a machine in the past and come to the conclusion that it would not be powerful enough and it had decided that an underperforming product might damage its brand. Rather than scaling down their existing technology, Coalesce showed that the problem could be approached with a clean sheet of paper and with the right architecture a machine could be designed which was lightweight, easily manoeuvrable, easy to store and could provide the suction needed to pick up even wet horse muck.

The first step in the process was to gain an objective understanding of the performance of their existing smallest machine. Coalesce developed a test method and provided it to Terra-Vac. Once the pressure/flow characteristics at a range of performance level are understood a Product Requirement Specification will be generated which will drive the concept development phase.

Terra-Vac is currently testing its machines and Coalesce is working on the PRS and developing a generic system architecture model.

Based in Haverhill, Suffolk, Terra-Vac was originally an engineering company. Being surrounded by the many studs in and around Newmarket, it was a natural fit to start engineering suction cleaning machines to clean out stables and paddocks.

This is an essential job that has to be done regularly to protect the health of horses. This practice would previously have been done manually.

The machines were an immediate success and, since1982, over 5000 machines have been produced and sold in the UK and around the world.

Terra-Vac now have a range of machines to suit all sizes of equestrian establishments and in recent years have modified them to meet the needs of other markets like ground maintenance and local authorities.

2007 was an important year, marking 25 years of the production of Terra-Vacs.

Terra-Vac

One of the areas in which Coalesce has significant experience is Drug Delivery Devices. The market is highly regulated and often the intellectual property landscape is crowded. The key to successful device design is to thoroughly understand the innovation space and to focus efforts where they are most likely to gain advantage.

One recent client had a reasonably mature device but they were having reliability issues with a particular sub-system. The challenge was to improve the sub-system whilst minimally impacting on the rest of the device. The physical envelope and performance criteria were tightly defined, so at first glance, there seemed little scope for new ideas. However, by challenging some of the seemingly fixed constraints, and with some lateral thinking, the team was able to consider a wide range of solutions which lead to some valuable insights. Concepts were analysed against a number of criteria so that a range of scenarios could be considered – least change, lowest cost, lowest risk and so on.

The most promising concepts were prototyped and tested and, within a short space of time, the client was able to choose from three credible solutions.

Of course the requirements are not always so well defined.

Another client was developing a portfolio of device technologies to complement some of its emerging therapies. Coalesce was tasked with developing concepts for one of these technologies. Such an open brief can be daunting, but the team quickly realised that the problem could be looked at analytically before embarking on the ideation process. The first step was to research the prior art and a novel, highly visual and quite powerful mapping technique was developed which ensured that the concepts thoroughly covered the innovation space. New concepts could now be mapped onto the IP landscape so that the client’s attorneys could take an early view on Freedom To Operate and the potential novelty of a given concept, something this company had not done hitherto. A large number of mechanisms were developed to a conceptual level and the client chose some of the more intriguing and technically challenging for further development. With something as critical as a drug delivery system, a rigorous mathematical understanding is vital to make turn a concept into a compelling proposal. Knowing at what stage in the process to use advanced computational methods such as FEA and CFD or when conventional engineering calculations are more appropriate ensures that development timescales are not inflated. In this case, the latter was chosen and the fundamental parameters of each concept were modelled mathematically in parallel with the development of the 3D CAD models.

Within weeks, the first prototypes were being assembled and bench tested and the insights gained were fed back into the models to produce more refined Proof of Principle models. This combination of imagination, rigour and pragmatism enabled the team to deliver working models of three entirely novel concepts supported by engineering calculations and guidance on intellectual property within ten weeks of starting the project.

There are a number of reasons why Coalesce is a good choice for companies who develop Drug Delivery Devices. We have the experience and the technical nous to understand your requirements and to build the optimal team to deliver results on time. Our efficient structure and network of independent experts gives us the flexibility to be involved at any stage in the development process, whilst still providing excellent value. Finally, our Quality System and professional approach, garnered from years at the highest level in technical consulting, ensure that we can provide the traceability and continuity which are crucial in this highly regulated market.

Cosworth already designs low-volume, rugged enclosures to withstand extreme environments. This new hand-held device adds a new dimension as it needs to be used by people in demanding conditions such as stormy seas and must be made using higher volume manufacturing processes. Cosworth asked Coalesce to help it with these new challenges to ensure that the quality and performance of the final product would meet their stringent standards.

A project which requires input from a number of different disciplines is ideally suited to Coalesce’s Open Product Development approach and in this case the mechanical, ID, and electronics teams worked closely together. Cosworth, Wright Design and Coalesce shared information using Pro/ENGINEER as the primary CAD interface. Prototypes were provided by CA Models and Complete Fabrication to prove key sub-systems, in particular the challenging sealing requirements, and this resulted in a design that met the specifications first time.

A number of fully functioning representative demonstrator models were produced and Cosworth used these to give its customers an early look at the system so that they could incorporate their feedback before committing to the final design.

Cosworth was very pleased with the outcome with its Engineering Manager, Steve Green commenting “Coalesce quickly understood the requirements of the project and worked together with other parties to develop an extremely impressive prototype in a very short timescale. The quality of the prototype was of a standard that could be used in the field by the customer so that feedback on the design could be captured. Coalesce then used the customer comments and manufacturing feedback to refine the design further, improving its manufacturability and usability. I have been impressed with the quality of service and domain knowledge provided by Coalesce and look forward to working on future projects together.”

About the Cosworth Group:
The Cosworth Group of companies provides high performance technologies to a diverse range of global industries including automotive, defence, energy generation and sports. The Cosworth Group is headquartered in Northampton, UK and operates additional facilities in the UK, North America and India to leverage its unique combination of advanced technologies, mechanical and electronic engineering expertise and globally recognized brand to deliver performance solutions.

Cosworth

Wright Design

CA Models

Complete Fabrication