Sourcing ELECTRONICS S
Understanding time-to-market
Time-to-market:what is it,why is it important,what to do next By Jon Barrett
When I started my engineering career I wasn’t surprised that my team would be working to a deadline. It seemed like a sensible idea to ensure everyone was aiming at a common goal, both employees and subcontractors. Sometimes the deadlines were met, sometimes they slipped, usually due to unexpected engineering problems during the product testing phase. Such is the nature of innovation.
Then the world started to change. Engineering design and
manufacturing started to be described as a process. This was being driven by a number of factors including: increasing use of computer aided design systems; greater reliance on subcontract manufacturing; increasing product complexity; and most importantly of all, a new breed of customers demanding more for less.Without formalised design, development, manufacturing and routes to market it simply wouldn’t work.
During this period the phrase ‘time-to-market’ started to
replace ‘deadline’. The problem was, as a humble employed engineer I just couldn’t understand the difference. Luckily I had the wisdom to simply ask a more senior engineer and he was plain talking enough to explain it in language I understood. His reply went something like this: ‘My family house is the security for the money I needed to borrow to develop the new product. Every day the product fails to reach the market is another day
30 | July 2010
that my home is at risk, another day I have to pay interest on the loan and another day my competitors have to win over another customer. Time-to-market is everything’.
Fromthat second everything became clear. I now watch as some
companies beat their competitors tomarket with new products and become virtual globalmonopolies. Likewise, I watch othersmove their launch date, thenmove it again, then go bust. For example I watched one software business launch a world first, beating the next nearest competitor tomarket by about six-months. The result was that the product set the standard, raised the barrier to entry and built a sound customer base before the competitor even had time to write their press release.
Froman electronics perspective, two key factors influence time-
to-market. The time it takes to design, develop and test the product, plus the lead time of rawmaterials prior tomanufacture. Given that design, development and test are labour intensive tasks, simply allocatingmore resource can reduce time-to-market. However, component lead time is a different issue. Here, somany aspects of the supply chain are beyond the direct control of the OEM. Thus, the only solution is for the OEMto ensure its working relationships with its suppliers are bullet proof, with every link in the supply chain responsible for interrogating the OEM’s predicted demand and responding with uninterrupted supply.
www.electronics-sourcing.eu
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52