Client: Cannon Hygiene
Project: Compact Feminine Hygiene Waste Unit Product Design
Expertise: Product Design, Mechanical Design
Reducing life-cycle costs with design for the whole service
- High-capacity feminine hygiene bin
- Eight months to design and develop
- Whole life-cycle analysis and design
- Value engineering to reduce component count
- Materials specification and mould-flow optimisation
- Prototypes assembled by Lucid
The Situation
Hygiene service provision is a competitive business with a relatively commoditised offer. Process costs are heavily dependent on the efficiency of waste handling.
The Challenge
Cannon Hygiene believed less is more.
Smaller bins with a larger capacity meant the same product would fit more sites, offering economies of scale in purchasing. More bins could fit in fewer vehicles, saving fuel. Improved ergonomics could help operatives carry more units on-site, accelerating service. Improving assembly and disassembly could speed up the wash cycle. Better structural design and materials specification could help parts last longer.
Our Solution
Working with Cannon’s team, our industrial designers made a value map of service process, to focus design on opportunities for improvement.
We developed an innovative opening mechanism that increased capacity with a reduced the view of the contents. “Hard” factors, such as how parts arrived on pallets, cleaning, delivery and disposal at end-of-life were balanced with “soft” factors, like foot pedal sensitivity, smell, appearance and feel of existing products.
Iterations of models, visuals and extensive analysis of 3D CAD simulations were used to develop a product design proposal.
Technical challenges included tolerance, structural and mould-flow issues inherent in minimising materials cost and production time.
A “right first time, every-time” operation design requirement meant optimising ergonomics to ensure repeated robust assembly of simple mechanisms in a hot wash cycle.
The Result
The Cannon compact unit is not just compact in terms of its fit into small washroom cubicles. It’s compact on resource use, minimising delivery and assembly costs, and reduces the number of rounds driven in a service cycle.
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