CREATIV[E]NGINE

The Journey of Electronic Products from idea to customer's hand

It require interdisciplinary expertise to bring an idea from concept to life. There is a need to bring people with background as diverse intellectual background like manufacturing,design,core electronics, management together and work together. To survive in today's competitive market you have to give a feature rich product to your customer and that too at lowest possible price. In today's era of globalisation the markets are now open for everyone and while this leads to opportunity to serve more customers it also poses the difficulty of surviving the competitive market. One of the strategy that the companies adopt is to accomplish different parts like say the software from firms in India and for manufacturing needs get the job done in china and this way the price of the final product comes down.

Below is a block diagram representation of Product design cycle:

The process starts with an IDEA that may be a completely new product idea or an improvement or enhancement to the existing idea. After this a comprehensive research is carried out to determine the feasibility of the idea and decisions like which existing technology is to be used out of the pool of technologies is made. Sometimes a product is practically feasibly by one technology and is not with another or out of the two technology one provides same performance but cheaper final product so every care should be taken during this phase because this is going to be the basis of product performance.

Once the research phase is over and you come out with a circuit that you are going to use to implement the feature the prototyping is done,you take into account the erogonomics of the products and refine the look and feel of the product and then multiple design reviews are done to make sure everything is working as it should be,once the performance of product is satisfactory here, the next step is to analyse the manufacturing capabilities and things like what processes needs to be outsources what can be one in-house are decided,then documentation is created these includes the documents supplied to the user as user guides and the directions and information to be provided to the customer support people.

Agency compliance ensure that the company followed all the rules and regulation like the environmental regulations and safety measures are taken. Agency compliance is another major step and sometimes it pose to be a hurdle and cause of delay of product release one very recent example that i came across is the delay in the release of official touch screen for raspberry pi due to the compliance. There are FCC agency compliance for America and CE for the European countries and you need to have a compliance certificate to sell your product in these countries.

After all this you bring the product to market, and right marketing of the product is very important these days. If you look around yourself you will easily find many examples of some innovative and out of the box marketing strategies that the companies are adopting. There is great craze among people for some products like a new iphone launch and samsung's galaxyS4 . People stand in queue for whole night to get hold of the first phone. Samsung introduced the concept of virtual queue when it launched the S4 where the customers were turned into marketers. Rather than physically standing in queue to get the phone an on-line queue was made and the more you tweet and comment about the product the more you will move ahead in the queue.

Finally after the product is sold you need to give good customer service so that you make sure the customer is happy with your product.