Future Trends in International Product Design
Anyone who works in product design should be aware of approaching trends, both in the United States and worldwide. By being aware of the newest trends, one can approach product design with foresight. It’s all about better predicting what customers around the world will need and want.
The following are three approaching trends in international product design.
1. Augmented reality will be integrated into the product design cycle
With the advent of 3D CAD modeling—a considerable upgrade from its 2D counterpart—product designers were given the means to conceptualize a product before building a mock-up.
Augmented reality will take this conceptualization a step further. With AR, designers can envision their ideas with unprecedented precision. By engaging with products in this manner early on in the design process, professionals can significantly reduce the margin for error, saving their company a great deal of time and money.
As Kevin Wrenn states in SmartIndustry, AR can “superimpose the digital representation onto a physical asset once it has been produced to compare the configurations of the product through its evolution—whether that’s ‘as-designed,’ ‘as-built,’ ‘as-manufactured,’ or ‘as-serviced.’
In addition to providing accurate renditions of a product, AR will also help designers view their products in different situations and environments. The possibilities are truly endless.
Augmented reality will be a real game-changer for international product design, as it will enable global collaboration. Regardless of one’s location, AR is making it possible to participate in a product’s plan at any stage.
2. 3D printing and additive manufacturing will become more prevalent
3D will continue to disrupt long-established industrial procedure and support mass-production at scale. Additive manufacturing has already made significant contributions to medicine, sustainability, education, and more. 3D printing, moreover, challenges the “constraints of conventional manufacturing methods—the expensive and time-consuming tooling before even one part can be produced.”
3D printing and additive manufacturing will grow more common in international product design and construction. Wrenn anticipates “low-volume production during the introduction of a new product, replication of hard-to-source spare parts, [and] distributed or local manufacturing in emerging markets” are only a few instances where additive manufacturing “can yield benefits even for lower-complexity parts.”
3. Single-source firms will be deemed the most reliable and coveted product design partners
Using numerous suppliers is often accompanied by difficulty tracking progress, confusion, and squandered time.
On the other hand, single-source firms help maintain continuity throughout the entire product design process, which is especially important when it comes to international product design.
We anticipate single-source firms becoming the most preferred partners in international product design. Single-source firms help reduce costs, and can anticipate when a company needs more supplies. This kind of care is customer service at its best and proves invaluable with international product design.
Pivot’s newly installed mirrored surface mount technology (SMT) production line located in US and Asia can simultaneously manufacture same product, with same specifications ensuring that there never a production interruption, that product is made wherever in the world it is most efficiently possible and that quality is never compromised.
Pivot International is a leader and one of the most trusted names in international product design. When If you’re ready to get ahead by revolutionizing your operations, we’re here to help. With over forty years of expert experience, we’ve had the pleasure of assisting businesses bring new products to market, again and again. We hope you’ll choose to contact us today.
Beware of These 3 Product Development Myths
Bringing untested assumptions to the product development process can lead to a host of preventable frustrations and costly mistakes. While the truth of certain product development assumptions may appear to be self-evident, closer examination reveals them as myths. Take care to ensure your business doesn’t fall prey to these or other common myths that can derail your product development and hurt your bottom line.
Myth #1: 100% utilization of resources will lead to enhanced performance.
It’s easy for a product developer to reason that the more time employees invest in a product, the more efficient they’ll be. The problem with this assumption is that it’s based on faulty reasoning. Human beings are not machines and product development is qualitatively different from manufacturing. When managers fail to recognize the difference between product development and manufacturing, they compromise rather than enhance speed, efficiency, and output.
Unlike machines and manufacturing, both humans and product development processes entail high variability since the tasks intrinsic to the latter are unpredictable and non-repetitive. With automated processes like manufacturing, a 10 percent increase in production volume translates to 10 percent more time to complete, but these metrics don’t hold with product development. With product development, assigning a team 10 percent more work may result in a 100 percent increase in the time required to complete it. Applying linear reasoning to non-linear processes is a recipe for trouble.
Myth #2: Manufacturing products in large batches is the most cost-effective.
Though there can be obvious cost benefits to higher volume orders, using this metric alone can be an incredibly expensive oversight. The benefits of large volume production can quickly be outweighed by less obvious drawbacks, and it is these drawbacks that lean manufacturing first emerged to overcome.
Lean manufacturing is an approach that relies on “just-in-time” production to drastically reduce waste, increase productivity, improve lead times, streamline processes, enhance quality, promote sustainability, raise employee morale, and boost profits. When looking for a product manufacturer, lean practices are crucial to realizing ROI on prior product development, and single-source manufacturers like Pivot International have elevated lean practices to an art.
Myth #3: The more features a product has, the more desirable to consumers it will be.
Consumers seem to have a hard time understanding that less is often more, at least until after they’ve purchased a product. Studies have shown that prior to purchase, consumers place more value on how many “bells and whistles” a product has, only to realize after purchase that a wealth of features often translates to a less-than-friendly user experience.
In other words, once customers have been enticed by and purchased exceptionally “feature-rich” products, they find their user experience compromised by the complexity of these very features. Though more opportunistic companies might see this as a good thing by reasoning that the sale of the product is where the profit lies, this reasoning is unsound (not to mention disingenuous) as it takes into account neither the consumer nor product lifecycle.
Finding the proper threshold for the number of features that attract consumers without compromising their user experience is the “sweet spot” of product development. Collaborating with a professional designer or engineer can help you better identify this sweet spot and make the product development process smoother, faster, and more profitable.
If you’re trying to bring a product to market and could use professional design or engineering support, or if you’ve completed the product development phases and are looking for a lean manufacturer, we can help. At Pivot International, we’re a collaborative design, development and manufacturing firm with over 46 years of experience in helping businesses profitably realize their product’s potential. Interested in learning what a partnership with Pivot might mean to you and your product? Reach out to us today and consult with one of our design professionals for free.
Product Design and Development Companies: 2 Approaches to Agile Innovation
Product-design and -development companies are under intense pressure to create innovative products and services. Many design teams, particularly at established companies that specialize in industrial products, are attempting to adopt agile practices to compete with the smaller startups that adopted those methods at their inception.
But for established companies, achieving large-scale agile practices doesn’t happen overnight, and to maintain competitive advantage with agile startups, product design and development teams can benefit from two approaches to accelerating innovation that integrate easily with their established activities and operations.
1. Tapping an innovation ecosystem: Pitch Night
Many companies are interested in boosting their design and development offerings but lack the in-house resources to generate new ideas. Companies in this position can essentially create “pop-up” innovation events by hosting a “pitch night” where startups compete for prizes to solve a product-design or -development challenge that the host company can use to inform its own process.
As recounted by McKinsey & Company:
For a tier-one industrial supplier, a pitch night led to the creation of an advanced-analytics engine used to improve the design of industrial transmissions. The supplier began the pitch-night process by issuing four use cases to a wide range of startups and calling for them to outline potential solutions. It chose 100 or so intriguing responses and brought in those startups to make four-minute presentations to a jury of the company’s CEO, chief digital officer, selected board members, and business-unit heads. In the contest related to smart industrial transmissions, the jury identified an especially promising solution from a small group of data scientists who had been spun out of a university. That team was given a commission to spend eight weeks creating a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP worked well enough that the company calculated that it would have a payback period of just three months and could be scaled into product improvements worth some €500 million in annual revenue.
2. Capitalizing on collaboration: Innovation garages
As pitch nights make clear, creative collaboration—both formally structured and organically occuring—is the key driver of innovation. One reason startups tend to excel at innovation is that their relatively small personnel numbers allow for constant collaboration in response to shared, timely awareness of customers’ needs. In more established product-design and -development companies, however, many of the innovation efforts occur as departmentally partitioned, multi-staged, linear processes that preclude integrated understandings of what customers want, resulting in task redundancies, or designs or even manufacture of products that miss the mark.
For more established companies, creating and capitalizing on cross-functional teams holds the solution to achieving the diversity of collaboration at which startups often set the standard. One version of this kind of cross-functional team is found in the formation of an “innovation garage,” a self-contained cohort with minimal overhead tasked with rapidly generating new ideas. By definition, an innovation garage includes people from any department that would normally participate in any way in product-design and -development: data science, engineering, finance, operations, sales and marketing, and so forth. This cohort’s proces is adjudicated by agile practices and by expert practitioners: a product owner, who determines who sets the parameters for new products, and a scrum master, who oversees and manages the iterative prototyping process.
Leaders need to understand that the garage isn’t a showroom, but a collaborative work space for focused innovation. Further, the generativity of garages can be enhanced by suspending the bureaucratic processes to which other aspects of the business are subject that typically slow down or stall innovation efforts. Once a garage is up and running, the product owner can collaborate with strategists in the core business to expedite design projects most aligned with business objectives. This often entails developing a system for collecting and evaluating the viability of new ideas and how they factor in relation to commercial models.
While these two approaches aren’t ideal for every business, they do allow better-established companies that have yet to effect large-scale agile operations to leverage the strengths of startups toward achieving competitive and profitable innovations.
At Pivot, we’re industry leaders in innovative product-design and development services with a proven track record of over forty years of expert experience in partnering with entrepreneurs and established businesses alike to bring new products to market and to achieve agile operations. Contact us today and see what we can do for you.
How Effective Value Propositions Can Help You Create Better Products
A value proposition is a fancy way of noting what you offer your customers. It’s always best to start with your customers in mind when creating a new product because you’re designing your product for the consumer. This isn’t always as obvious to some companies as you would think. If your product doesn’t suit customers’ needs, then you aren’t going to have many sales.
A value proposition can help you get completely clear on what it is you want to offer your target customers. Keeping consumers in mind while you create your value proposition is essential to help you create better products.
There are five types of value involved in a value proposition, and each one can help you create products your customers want. The five types of value are:
- Functional
- Emotional
- Economic
- Symbolic
- End value
Functional
Functional value focuses on the problem you are solving for your customers. How does your product make their lives easier? What purpose does your product serve? Your product must solve a problem for your consumer if it’s going to sell. If you can clearly demonstrate the problem your product solves, then you’ve created functional value.
Emotional
The value inherent in emotions relates to how customers feel about your brand. You want them to become attached to your brand so they will become loyal shoppers. How will customers feel when they use your product?
Economic
Economic value is all about money. Do your customers feel like they are getting good value for their money when they buy your product? If your product is less expensive than competitors’ products, then consumers will see it as having economic value because of this financial advantage you’ve created for them.
Symbolic
What does your company stand for in the minds of your customers? Consumers want to feel like they are purchasing products from companies that are doing good in the world. Social responsibility comes into play here too. Consumers like to know that companies have considered the impact they have on the environment and are taking steps to make the world a better place.
End value
End value relates to customer satisfaction. If customers are confident they will be happy with the products they purchase from you, then you’ve created end value. Offering a guarantee goes a long way toward creating end value. To create end value, it’s important that you clearly communicate what the customer will get when they purchase from you.
Creating an effective value proposition that incorporates each of the five types of value will help you create better products, because consumers are going to see those products as solving a problem, making them feel good, and saving them money–all while originating with a company that provides great value and cares about its impact on the world.
Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with strengths in software development, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and industrial design. Pivot also offers a number of business development services to help you build a business around your products. To learn more about how Pivot can help you create effective value propositions and better products, contact us today.
The Benefits of a Single-Source Product Development Firm
There are many advantages to choosing a single-source product development firm. Some of the obvious ones include increased efficiency, lower costs, and increased accountability. But there are many other advantages such as ease of communication and vendor management as well as the ability to be more hands-off so you can spend your time focusing on other areas of your business.
A single-source product development firm will handle everything for your organization. This simplifies things a lot. You don’t need to worry about coordinating different stages or processes of product development because a single-source firm does it all. This frees up your employees for other important tasks in your business.
When working with a single-source product development firm, there’s no need to figure out how to assemble the ideal product development team. In addition to saving time and money with single-sourcing, your business will experience increased accountability because you only have to keep track of one firm. Working with one firm on your product development will also offer you the following benefits.
Ease of Communication
Time spent communicating with your product development team will be greatly reduced as a result of using a single-source product development firm. Instead of having to check in with multiple firms and relay messages back and forth, you will only need to make one phone call to check up on your project. This will allow you to feel like you can nurture the relationship you have with your product development firm. There’s no need to rush your phone call because you only have one to make.
Simplified Vendor Management
Vendor management will also be easier with a single-source product development firm. Instead of having to keep track of and pay multiple vendors for your product development, you will only have invoices coming from one source. This makes it much easier to schedule payments so you can stay current with your project bills. This way your project can continue without any delays due to missed payments.
Ability to be Hands-Off
Often one of the reasons businesses outsource their product development is because they don’t have the resources in house. By hiring a single-source firm there’s no need to coordinate all the different parts of your project. You can pass your project off to the experts and leave the rest up to them, if that’s what you want. Request more information is always an option if you decide later that’s what you prefer.
Pivot International is a single-source product development firm that can help you through the entire product development process. We have expanded over the last couple of years by acquiring companies like Avatar Engineering and WideBlue that fit with our offerings and values in order to provide businesses like yours with expert product development services all under the same roof, so to speak.
Our services include everything from product and market research to design and testing. If you’re ready to see what a single-source product development firm can do for you, contact us today for more info.
The Expanding Role of Research in Product Development
Although many companies may view research as tedious, research is a critically important step in the product development process. Conducting research properly at the beginning stages of product development as well as at key points during the process can save a lot of time and help prevent disastrous mistakes.
There are three key stages in the product development process where research plays a main part. In order to understand the expanding role of research in product development it’s important to note the different types of research and at what point in the product development stage they take place.
Exploratory
Exploratory research is much like market research. it’s a necessary first step in the development of a new product because it helps ensure your product is meeting a market need and filling a gap. If your product is not meeting a market need, it won’t sell.
During this stage, it’s imperative that you understand your target market and what their needs are. Most importantly, you want to know what problems they have so that you can solve that problem with your new product. Exploratory research is often conducted through focus groups and surveys completed by your own customers or even customers of your competition.
Evaluative
Evaluative research is conducted during the product design stage. Once you have a design, you need to test it for validity and this is where evaluative research comes in. This type of research will let you know if your design is on the right track to solving the main problem you set out to solve after conducting your exploratory research.
Testing your design helps you troubleshoot early design problems. Finding design problems at this stage of the process is much more efficient and cost effective than waiting until you have a final prototype, or worse, a final product.
Iterative
The research that takes place during the final stage of the design process is similar to evaluative research in that it helps identify design flaws but it is conducted during the beta phase of your product development. You have your prototype ready to go and you test it over and over to make sure it performs the same every time. This gives you a chance to identify and fix any performance deficiencies.
While conducting iterative research, you may ask a few potential customers to use the test product and report their findings in a feedback questionnaire. Depending on your product, it might be more appropriate to test it over and over again in the lab.
Product development firms can be a huge help when it comes to outsourcing parts of the new product development process like research. Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm specializing in software development, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and industrial design. Pivot International offers a wide range of services to help you with your research and product development. To learn more about how Pivot can help you with your product development, contact us today.
How Processes Can Make or Break a Product’s Development
A product’s successful development depends on adequate research, avoiding mistakes along the way, and following tried and true processes. For product development to be successful, the project must be executed properly. Here’s where having the right processes in place can make all the difference.
Processes ensure that everyone knows what to do at what point in the product’s development. They also allow for things to be checked off as you go along. With proper processes in place, all the steps required for successful product development are outlined before you even start the project.
There are many steps required in the successful development of a new product. Having the proper processes in place to safeguard against missing key steps along the way is the best way to avoid critical mistakes. Here are a few ways processes can make or break a product’s development.
Outline Steps
When you have a new product development process in place, it’s very clear what you need to do and at what point in the process. There are steps in every new product development project that are fundamental to the process, such as, research, prototype development, and testing.
An experienced product development firm will have all the steps in the product development process already outlined to ensure nothing gets missed during the product’s development. A missing step in the process could result in a faulty product needing more time and money to get to market.
Chart Progress
A new product development process will allow you to check off steps as you work through your product development. In conjunction with outlining the steps required in the process, this acts as a safeguard to ensure all the steps are completed at the right time.
Assign Duties
When you have processes in place, it’s easy to assign duties to product development team members. When team members know what they are supposed to be doing and at what point in the product development process, they are able to work more efficiently which will result in less project costs and less time taken to complete the project.
Monitor Results
Monitoring results is a critical step in the product development process. After each step is completed, the appropriate tests can be conducted to determine if the product is meeting the required standards. When processes are in place, monitoring happens almost automatically because it is included as part of the process.
Failing to include monitoring in the product development process will most certainly result in a failed product. Without monitoring, you have no way of knowing if you are meeting functionality or standards requirements.
Processes can most certainly make or break a product’s development. A good process allows you to understand required steps, assign duties, chart progress towards your goal, and monitor results.
Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with a long-standing history of product development. We have over forty years experience in the field of product development and have perfected our processes during that time. To learn more about our services and how we can help you streamline your product development processes, contact us today.
Why Product Development Management is Important for Global Businesses
Globalization isn’t just a trend anymore, it’s a necessity. If you plan to be a big player, you need to go global. For companies who are doing business globally, product development management is a vital part of their business. The global supply chain can impact your product’s success in a major way, which is why it’s so important to make sure all aspects of your product development are being managed as efficiently as possible.
When your firm is doing business globally, you may have part of your supply chain in one country, and a different part in another country. Project management for global product development can help you manage this, as well as provide better engineering efficiency, access to international expertise, more flexible resource allocation, and products that are designed for the global marketplace.
There are three things most companies don’t realize about global manufacturing. Global manufacturing:
- Allows products to compete on a global scale,
- Uses more sophisticated supply chains, and
- Requires a greater supply of goods.
Global product development brings with it a number of challenges, including managing a geographically diverse product development team and coordinating sourcing of materials from low, medium, and high cost areas. Product development management can help mitigate the challenges of global product development in the following ways.
Maintaining Product Development as a Priority
A product development manager and their team must be committed to the success of the product development strategy. The best ways to do this are to assemble an ideal product development team dedicated to global product management or to outsource your product development management to a firm that specializes in this service. Global centers will need to be set up to facilitate the distribution of work and determine what tools, resources, training, and processes need to be in place.
Compartmentalizing Processes and Parts
When managing product development for a global business, it’s important to separate processes for global distribution. You’ll need to determine which processes will be handled by which team and in which country. Similarly, you’ll need to determine which locations are the best for manufacturing component parts in such a way that their separate development as well as their integration into the complete product is optimized.
Making Detailed Project Plans
Part of the product development management process is to determine what decisions will be made at what stage of the process. This becomes even more important when your business is global. It’s no longer just a matter of who’s doing what when, but you also have to decide who at which location is making the decisions. It’s important to coordinate decisions across the entire product development team at all locations of your operation.
At Pivot International, we provide product development and project management services to help global businesses with their product development so they can focus on the rest of their business. We coordinate everything from conceptualization all the way to product manufacturing and distribution. Our project managers are world class and have experience launching a diverse portfolio of award-winning products. To learn more about how we can help you with your global product development, contact us today.
Why Product Development Firms are a Great Match for Mid-Sized Companies
There’s a lot more to product development than meets the eye, especially if you’ve never done it before. Many things need to be coordinated to successfully launch a product and there are often growing pains along the way. From conceptualization to production, you want to make sure you’ve thought of everything to ensure your product is as successful as possible.
Here’s where a product development firm can be a great match for mid-sized companies. Mid-sized companies don’t always have all the resources they need at every stage of product development. Whether you plan to outsource all of your product development or just one stage, here are a few reasons why you should consider it.
Control Your Costs
Product development firms specialize in getting your product to market as quickly and efficiently as possible. They’ve been through the process many, many times before. One of the biggest mistakes to avoid in the product development process is letting costs get out of hand. Product development firms can help you set costs at each stage of the product development process and then create strategies for you to stay within your budget. Research has shown that companies are more likely to meet their budget when they’re being held accountable by a third party.
Manage Your Timeline
Because product development firms have so much experience with the product development process, they are experts at setting an achievable timeline and making sure you stick to it as much as possible. Open innovation is speeding up the product development process. Under open innovation, ideas aren’t just coming from your own product development team anymore, but also from other business partners like product development firms. Collaborating with others can help you save time when looking at design ideas and solutions to product development challenges.
Leverage Outsourced Expertise
Working with an outside product development firm can really expand horizons for your mid-sized company. By working with a product development firm, your company now has access to all the experts employed by that firm, including designers and engineers. At some point during the product development process, your company is likely going to need more employees to help with the process. If you’re already working with a product development firm, you can outsource the work to them and save yourself the hassle of hiring temporary employees who may or may not be the right fit to work on your project.
Product development firms have the expertise and manpower to help you see your product development project from the very beginning idea stages right through to production of the final run. They can help you save time and manage costs because they’re seasoned experts that have been through the process many times before.
At Pivot International we provide Project Management Services and Product Development Services to help you reach your product development goals. We’re a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with experts in the areas of industrial design, software development, and mechanical and electrical engineering. To learn more about how we can help you with your product development project, contact us today.
Integrating New Products With Your Current Product Line Up
One of the biggest reasons products aren’t successful is because of a lack of research into product development and the industry market. This needs to be considered when integrating new products into your current product lineup as well. On top of making sure you do your market research, you’ll need to make sure the development and launch of your new product isn’t going to affect sales of your current product. Here are a few things you can do to ensure a smooth integration of your new products.
Research
If you want to make sure your new products are as successful as your current products, you need to do your research. Is the market ready for your new product? Survey your customers to make sure there’s a need for your new product before you go to the expense of developing and launching it. Your research will tell you what your customers need and want as well as what price you can charge and what channels are the best distribution methods. If all these things don’t fit with your current product line up, then you might want to reconsider the new product.
Capacity
Do you have the ability to produce and distribute your new products without taking anything away from your existing products? If not, then you’ll need to come up with a plan to hire more staff or increase your outsourcing, so sales of your new product don’t happen at the expense of losing sales on your current product. That will result in angry customers and a steady decline in business.
Distribution
Take a look at your existing production and distribution schedule. Will your new product interfere with it? A common supply chain problem is not staying efficient. Adding another product to the same supply chain is going to cause some disruption, and you need to plan for that. Consider hiring more staff or outsourcing. If the new product is going to be on a totally separate supply chain then you also need to figure out how you’re going to manage that.
Training
Your employees are not only going to need training regarding the details of the new product, but also about how it will be distributed and promoted. It’s important to communicate your big picture vision of how your new product fits with your current products so your employees know what’s going on. Timing is critical when it comes to training. It will need to be planned so employees are sufficiently prepared for the launch of the product, and they’re not learning about it as it’s being rolled out.
Planning around the timing of the development and distribution of your new product will go a long way to ensuring a smooth integration with your current product line up. If this seems overwhelming, we can help. At Pivot International we offer project management services that have helped launch a diverse array of award-winning products into the marketplace. Our project managers have strategies for integrating new products into existing businesses and can guide your new product development effort to success. Contact us today to learn more.
