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Features

Crossing the Design Challenge Chasm

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The world of products is becoming increasingly complex.
Succeeding in today's competitive product markets requires firms to respond
more quickly to changing market demands, to differentiate more product
variations for rapidly segmenting markets. Manufacturers have embarked on
continuous product improvement, delivering more features, more innovation, and
better looking products-all while meeting increasingly stringent product
quality and supply chain cost targets.

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Until recently, every manufacturer had a large internal design
team which would continuously monitor customer feedback and develop products to
meet evolving customer needs. However, as organizations move towards catering
global customers, the internal teams would feel the increasing pressure for
delivering both consistency and quality design innovation on all projects. This
might lead to organizations being viewed by end customers as being "less
innovative" in case of any project delays or compromise on the quality and
thereby move to the competition. These dynamic changes in the marketplace have
ensured that the product design team is now at the center stage of the
manufacturing process.
Companies
need to constantly monitor the changes in the marketplace and develop a
strong mechanism to track the ever-changing consumer mindset

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Essential Component

Technology has always been an essential component of product design process.
However, the role and involvement of technology in the design process is
increasing day by day. Product design teams have now begun to realize that
technology can add much more value in developing better products. Hence instead
of only getting technology companies to build the IT infrastructure to support
robust manufacturing, product design teams are now involving technology
companies in the development of new products. With specialized vendors
supporting product design and development, companies can now focus on building
programs to target new markets, enhance customer relationships, geographic
expansion, etc. Most importantly, such vendors, considering that they are solely
concentrating on providing product design solutions could provide a more
"out of the box" approach to product development. Having already
proved their capability in IT application development, Indian IT companies are
best suited to take advantage of this situation.

Challenges

However, there are significant challenges that Indian IT companies would
need to counter to exploit the full potential of this business segment.
Outsourcing vendors will have to compete without a significant cost advantage
not only against vendors in low-cost countries but also with specialized
engineering firms existing in highly industrialized nations such as the US,
Japan and Germany. Thus, to survive in this market, Indian IT companies need to
develop a significant pool of engineers who have the requisite skills in the
area of product design. These companies need to function more as product
companies building the next generation products instead of branding themselves
as technology companies' supporting backend product development. They need to
develop a complete understanding of the client and his business environment
ultimately serving as an extension of the client's business.

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Examples
to Reckon

The Medical Industry



Let me take the example of a couple of industries to demonstrate this
point starting with the medical industry. Some of the challenges in the
product design for the medical industry include long development cycles,
high component cost, component reliability, etc. The products developed
for these industries tend to be known as "high-mix, low-volume,"
which means that they are a highly complex combination of parts, though
not produced in high volume. Thanks to the government regulation, demand
for product quality and reliability is extremely high. Also, the
regulatory environment in this industry requires that product design,
assembly, and manufacturing processes be extensively documented. Medical
devices have only been regulated since 1976 and although there are many
parallels to the requirements from drugs, device regulation is more risk
based and relies more heavily on performance standards, some developed by
FDA, but many more by international standards organizations. Finally,
because of the products' ultimate use, medical industry experts must be
involved in their design and engineering. Not surprisingly, all that makes
it is a challenging market. Hence for an Indian technology vendor to exist
and succeed in this market place, it requires a comprehensive
understanding of not only the product environment but also of the
international compliance issues that affect the product. To support
product development in the medical space, Indian vendors must understand
how their products are performing during the entire product life cycle and
would be able to react in real-time when problems arise.

The Consumer Electronics
Industry

The increased consumer demand for innovative electronic products at lower
costs presents tremendous challenges for companies. Product obsolescence
and extremely short product lifecycles require the companies to optimize
their investments into different designs. The backend production
environment needs to adapt to the product changes. Product mobility has
become an essential feature. Consumers want products which comply with all
technical standards and work across geographies. As companies seek to add
more product features, one needs to ensure that the royalty cost
associated with various technologies does not increase the overall cost of
the product.

Industrial Products

In the case of industrial products, one key challenge is to simulate the
real world environment and develop products which can provide consistent
results. For eg, while designing the next generation of elevators, how
does one build an elevator which can work well in a 100-storey commercial
building? Considering that the product lifecycle is much longer, how does
one build a product which is unique and will sustain its relevance in the
medium- to long-term? One would also need to keep a tab on the regulatory
environment for an industrial product across various geographies.

Design is clearly not just about the 'look and feel' of the
products. It is true for some industries like the mobile phone industry. But at
the end of the day, it is the quality and the stability of the product that
takes precedence.

One of the most important issues faced by designers and
engineers-well ahead of time-to-market and cost pressures-is the complexity
in both products and processes in the product design and engineering. If IT
companies cannot comprehend and provide the relevant solutions, achieving
success might become a distant dream.

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Design is
clearly not just about the 'look and feel' of products. It is true for
some industries like the mobile phone industry. But at the end of the day,
it is the quality and the stability of the product that takes precedence

Overall Perspective

The industries talked about in "Examples to Reckon" provide an
overall perspective on the complexity involved in product design. To ensure
success in this market, IT companies first and foremost need to develop deep
domain expertise. It is only when you understand the client and his pain areas
completely that one can provide the appropriate solutions. Companies have to
develop the right infrastructure, both physically and in terms of the available
talent pool. Last but not the least, companies need to constantly monitor the
changes in the marketplace and develop a strong mechanism to track the
ever-changing consumer mindset. By ensuring that they meet all of the above,
Indian IT companies can surely create a mark for themselves in the product
design space and replicate the success they have achieved in the IT services
space.

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Ajay Chamania

The author is senior VP, Product Engineering Services, Patni
Computers

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