Product Design and Packaging
National Instruments develops products that minimize the amount of raw materials and energy used, thus decreasing the cost of customer applications. This commitment is evident in NI’s graphical system design approach, which offers software-defined, modular hardware platforms. Graphical system design reduces the cost and energy consumption of customer applications because all the components share the same chassis and high-performance CPU, eliminating the need for redundant chassis, processors, displays, and other components. This model ensures that NI platforms can adapt to changing needs and new applications, providing a single platform to last through multiple generations of applications.
Challenges to the product design process include maintaining compliance with evolving environmental legislation and gathering material content information for components. Difficulty in gathering material information may occur for several reasons, including suppliers not having the requested data, data confidentiality, and the length of time it takes to move through the supply chain.
Managing Critical Substances
NI manages the substances used in its products to comply with regulations including the following:
- RoHS —European Union Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances
- REACH —Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals
- Conflict Minerals Trade Act
Optimizing Product Packaging
NI ensures that its packaging designs have a minimal environmental footprint. For example, NI looks for opportunities to increase the use of recyclable materials, such as corrugated board, and to increase the use of paper as a replacement for polyurethane foam. In this area alone, NI has reduced polyurethane foam use by approximately 150 m3 annually, or 24 percent. Another example is switching to using molded protective thermoform end caps made of 100 percent recycled materials. The material is reusable for return shipments, which minimizes waste at both ends of the distribution cycle. This change on one product eliminated the use of polyurethane foam and reduced the amount of corrugated material by 26 percent per package compared to the previous packaging solution. The packaging team will continue to strive to research and evaluate new environmentally friendly materials to use on other NI product lines.
NI welcomes feedback on the packaging of NI products.
Polyurethane Foam Used
Polyurethane Foam Used (m3)
| 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 |
| 747 | 1249 | 511 | 463 | 353 |
Corrugated Board Used
Corrugated Board Used (kg)
| 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 |
| 157,199 | 200,901 | 141,907 | 154,661 | 168,672 |
Balázs Komlosi
International Distribution Center Manager at National Instruments
Balázs Komlosi, the distribution center manager at NI Hungary, sponsored a project to reduce product packaging dimensional weight in the hopes of reducing the NI environmental footprint as well as overall packaging costs. This was part of a worldwide effort for NI operations, and making changes in Hungary promised to have a huge impact because most NI packages are shipped from that location. NI Hungary packages 1 million kits a year using 120 different box sizes.
A significant part of this effort involved working with the kitting team because it actually packages the products and could help point out areas where NI could gain the most efficiency. The packaging engineering group was a key member of this team effort because it provided the design approval to ensure the new packaging met the design requirements to deliver the desired protection of the end product. Balázs Komlosi and team lead Balázs Almasi made sure the team understood project goals, and they quickly came up with solutions to help reduce dimensional weight. For example, the team figured out that by using recycled paper instead of foam, they could not only reduce the box size but also take advantage of a more easily recycled material. Six months into the project, savings were above and beyond the team’s expectations.
“A great thing about this project is that it is actually never-ending. We will always have new kits coming, so we will always have the opportunity to investigate and provide improvement suggestions to the packaging engineers,” Balázs Komlosi said.