Visionary Machines LLC needed their x-cap (used to hold corrugated plastic boards together) mass-manufactured at varying quantities. I was brought on to modify their component to be mass-manufactured.
For smaller quantities, 3D printing is used. However, if you want to do it in scale, you might as well optimize it. The X-Cap was modified to use 3.2x less mass without compromising its physical integrity.
X-Cap was also optimized for injection molding to ensure that it could be injection-molded without losing it's physical integrity
A while after designing the injection-molding and 3D printing models, I sourced a similar component that was commercially available. It required a light modification to the design, but the adoption of this component saved my client many months of development time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs.