Development
At the core of our service is a commitment to developing new biomedical polymer solutions for emerging device challenges. Our engineers engage with customers early in the design process providing manufacturability expertise and fast track prototypes for evaluation. A staged development process ensures goals and timelines are met throughout the development cycle, and the process is sufficiently robust to meet quality and manufacturing requirements in production.
At Foster Corporation the product realization process begins when a client contacts their inside technical sales representatives regarding a new biomedical polymer project. Providing a single and consistent point of contact for our clients, our technical sales representatives are assigned to a specific client and act as their voice within the organization, advocating for their needs to the entire development team including tooling and equipment designers, process engineers, quality representatives, and resource schedulers.
Biomedical polymer development project goals and objectives are detailed in a Scoping Document. Once the project scope is agreed to by the client, a quote is provided. Upon receipt of order, our engineering teams activate the development plan, designing tooling and equipment to support the process development. The proof of concept effort usually concludes with the delivery of prototype material to the client along with a design output review report from the engineering team. This report describes the development effort that was conducted, the current state of the process under development, and recommendations for the next steps.
After the client has utilized the prototype biomedical material for their own prototype builds and design verification, the development process may be complete and ready to move on to Trial phase during which the process design is validated and production and process controls are put into place. However it is common at this point for the development to enter an iterative phase based on the client’s initial prototype build and design verification. In such cases, the technical sales representative works with the client to establish a new scope of work to achieve the desired changes. This process repeats until the client is confident that a robust manufacturing process has been established and that the design has been verified.