The Chicago Pneumatic R&D Story
People. Passion. Performance. The three reasons why I joined Chicago Pneumatic. I am very proud to lead a dedicated team of passionate engineers from all over the world, to develop and deliver high performance products for our customers.
Product Development Process: Products designed by you for you
Our products are designed and engineered based on our customers’ needs and challenges. We strive to innovate and improve our products to make our customers’ lives easier and more comfortable every day.
At Chicago Pneumatic, we develop…
The role of Chicago Pneumatic’s research and development department is to understand our customers’ needs and develop innovative solutions for them. We have built our expertise and knowledge on field intelligence and very strong validation processes. To optimize performance evaluation we replicate real situations using prototypes. While highly effective, this approach does require serious investment in terms of time, money and resources. This process has proven to be very successful over the years and we want to continue this success by constantly evolving our development techniques, integrating new technologies to better meet our customers’ needs. Our dedicated team of people continuously learn about our end users’ applications and how to best solve their most difficult situations, from hard-to-reach areas to operator’s comfort. In R&D, we have invested a lot in digital simulation in order to predict a product’s performance and endurance. This enables us to optimize existing product development, which includes creative design and laboratory testing, with 3 objectives in mind.
Enhance quality: this is a never-ending goal that drives our day-to-day lives.
The use of simulation to detect potential problems before they actually occur allows our engineers to get a deeper and quicker understanding of our products and their mechanisms. Chicago Pneumatic laboratory testing goes beyond any standard specification. We put our products to the test at every step of the way - performance, endurance, noise, vibration, drop test, etc… - to make sure that they are the:
- safest
- most ergonomic
- most durable
- best performing tools on the market.
We want to offer our customers and end users the highest quality and the best designed tools answering their day-to-day needs.
Reduce time to market
Using digital simulation software has completely transformed our ability to provide solutions as soon as, or even before, the market needs them. Digital prototyping allows the Chicago Pneumatic R&D department to solve some issues within 48 hours: a process that would previously could have taken up to 3 months using real prototypes. We can computer-simulate testing within minutes, saving precious time and investment. 5000 different configurations can be completed within 1 hour, which creates endless possibilities… Also, having the capacity to produce and test our prototypes on site makes a huge difference for us. Between the design creation and the production, no time is lost. Our engineers are present at the testing and witness live what needs to be improved and why. The gain of time in terms of understanding, knowledge gain and improvement implementation is significant. Our state-of-the-art facility allows Chicago Pneumatic to be far more customer-responsive, because we have such a short time to market.
Improve innovation
Simulation helps to understand more and more our systems and to develop new ideas. This is just the beginning of a revolutionary way of working. We will continue to invest in more and more advanced digital simulation, to progress the quality and precision of our prototypes even further. At Chicago Pneumatic’s R&D department we have had continuous and technological innovations for many years and we are now exploring disruptive innovation. Our design engineers come up with game changing ideas on a regular basis; and in an established business such as power tools, this is a true added value. The challenge is to match these great ideas to the needs of our customers, in order to launch the perfect product. For this purpose, we have implemented the “Voice of the Customer” process to understand the true challenges our end users are facing so we can match their problems to our potential solutions. The results will be evident in the new products we introduce in the coming years. We believe that our commitment to pioneering new technologies and design will make us a true leader in the power tools segment.