Understanding the channel mindset

As part of the channel management, I was working with the world wide channel for distributing our CAD add-on products. I tried to find out the mindset of the channel so that I can position our products in their mind and motivate them accordingly. There were 3 key reasons which drives them for resellership:

1. Revenue : Falling short of revenues from the current portfolio and hence a need to generate additional set of revenues.
2. Entry strategy: Use the add-on product(s) as a door-opener to sell their other products.
3. Competition: Prevent competitors carrying same / similar products to enter their customer base or enter into competitor base.

So every reseller that I sign up, I figure out their motivation behind selling our product and then work with them accordingly. Many a times, I have asked time directly for the reasons they would like to be a reseller and I have got an answer which coincides with one or more of the reasons above.

Design for Manufacturability for Injection Molding

Design for Manufacturability or Design for Manufacturing (DFM) is the process where design engineers verify their designs from manufacturability standpoint. Generally, organizations have various DFM guidelines which a design engineer follows using manual verification process. But the current process has several issues:

•Manual reviews are cumbersome, prone to errors (and boring!)
•No tools to enforce the checks
•Inconsistent Design Quality
•Time Consuming Process
•Need for Proximity (between design & manufacturing engineers)

Currently, I am in the process of creating an automated tool which can catch manufacturability issues related to injection molding at the design stage itself. I am interested to know the set of rules that would be of interest to the design engineers for injection molding parts.