Honest EM USPs to assist clients.
An unfortunate and quite understandable problem clients have when selecting companies to do electronic product development is the tendency providers have to embellish their capabilities. This doesn’t really help either party. What follows is the EM’s points of excellence, its standard offerings, and a few comments about what it would refer (EM has many partners). It is our earnest hope that this is useful for potential clients.
At what does the EM excel?
It is important to be clear what’s meant by this question. This is not a list of competencies but rather the skills at which the EM has shown itself to perform better than its competition:
- Achieving demanding time to market requirements: through a combination of an extensive network of parallel suppliers, logistics and distribution experts, assembly and manufacturing contacts, and its concurrent engineering method, the EM has achieved deliveries that are literally a third of those expected from orthodox stage-gate development. This does mean time to market and not just time to functional prototype.
- Achieving escape velocity from the Proof of Principle (POP) prototype stage of development: projects can get stuck in an early stage of development, not because of any lack of intelligence among the people involved – such people are usually very intelligent, but because of a lack of knowledge of the suppliers, support, and manufacturing capabilities, early prototypes remain exactly that – early prototypes. The EM regards itself as outstanding at providing the resource to allow early prototypes to mature and develop such that time to manufacture becomes a firm date. Breaking free of early prototypes can also be about having enough technical know-how (maths, science, and engineering experience) and lateral thinking capability to engage properly on the details of a clients design: another core skill at which the EM excels.
- Turnkey new product development: our sister company (3P1) allows us to offer product design, mechanical engineering, electronics, and software/firmware. Coupled to this, the EM has extensive partnerships across the entire new electronics product development market from patent attorneys to digital marketing. Turnkey really is a core theme for us.
What are the EM’s standard competencies?
Core competencies, at which are reputable competition are also competent, are covered in our Competencies Article. These are basic design skills that should be expected of any electronics product development company, for example:
- Problem definition (specifications)
- Electronics design (circuit diagrams)
- Mechanical and product design (engineering drawings)
- Prototyping and manufacture
- Testing
What competencies would be referred to a trusted partner?
There are many fields that are not at all the EM’s speciality, and we certainly wouldn’t make claims with the disciplines in question despite having partners that do cover them. Some examples:
- patents and intellectual property
- marketing (digital or otherwise)
- manufacturing itself (we assist greatly with finding and configuring providers, but we don’t do any manufacturing ourselves)
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this article or have a design/development enquiry.