One of the key advantages of Agilian is that a project moves faster than with larger competitors and we know that getting to market reasonably quickly is important when launching your new product.
Agilian’s key benefit when it comes to speed is the ability to quickly get a risk analysis and a plan in place for addressing the challenges ahead. Going faster through the NPI process is generally possible, at the expense of higher costs and (typically) higher risks. We help you find the right balance and we execute it.
Our experience and our organization allow us to plan and engage actions in a way that will usually result in delivering your products to your customers earlier.
How Agilian can turbo-charge your product launch
If you require a launch date that is as early as realistically possible, we offer these benefits:
- Small factories (<100 people) may not have the technical ability or the network of suppliers that we have to tackle some of the challenges effectively.
- Large manufacturers (>1,000 people) often have impressive experience, but you need to ensure you get (and will keep getting) a lot of attention from their "heavyweight" project managers. If you are not one of their largest customers, you will work with a "B" team or a "C" team and your low-priority access to shared resources (R&D, quality, process engineering, ...) will slow progress down considerably.
- At Agilian, a senior technical project manager is involved in the day-to-day work until the start of tooling fabrication (DVT phase), where the organization changes and the different departments take more ownership of the project and gear up for mass production.
- When time is of the essence and the customer is willing to pay more to make progress faster, we organize biweekly, weekly, or even daily meetings of the 'core team' who works on the project, to address the challenges as they occur and to keep a high pace. In such cases, we follow an agile design approach, with as much user testing & feedback as possible, as long as that makes sense for your project. Our engineers don't disappear for several weeks (or months), working to a plan that is set in stone.
Why we have the ability to move fast
- Our R&D team has successfully developed innovative products in several categories - wearables (earbuds, wristbands, headbands), battery energy storage, mobility (e-skateboards), indoor plant management, pet feeders, keyboards, and so on. Our team has experience working on various technologies and materials and is used to adapting to each customer’s needs.
- Our R&D team of 30 includes mechanical/structural, electronic, firmware, and app development engineers.
- We have set up our own testing lab, co-located with the R&D and manufacturing activities, so prototypes and production samples can be tested quickly for performance and reliability.
- Our in-house industrial designers are used to working with our mechanical engineers and our tooling workshop, for seamless communication.
This chart demonstrates the typical flow for a project that already has the working prototype for an electro-mechanical product of medium complexity.
This chart demonstrates the accelerated flow for a similar project, this would typically be achieved by increasing the project’s budget.
Is there a risk of skipping important activities to move quickly?
Yes and no.
On the one hand, working more quickly doesn’t mean we happily jump over important validations of the NPI process. Here are some examples of steps that can’t be skipped entirely:
- The Initial feasibility study ensures there is a good plan for the next phases; it sometimes lasts over a month in case many challenges and key questions need exploring.
- DFM aligns the product design with what can be done in mass production while hitting the cost, timing, and quality objectives.
- Reliability reviews and testing, safety reviews, and compliance testing, confirm that the product can be placed on the market.
On the other hand, there are many ways certain steps can be done in parallel or started earlier, at the expense of higher risk. Here are examples where a customer may be willing to take a risk:
- Starting tooling fabrication for some of the custom-designed parts before the whole product design is validated – starting with the parts that are less risky.
- Ordering the components for both the pre-production pilot run(s) and the first mass production batch at the same time.
- Not waiting for the results from compliance testing, or reliability testing (for products that are not highly hazardous in their nature).
How much does the extra speed cost?
Every project is different, but as a general rule of thumb, a good metric is that to speed up the project by 50% (2 months instead of 3) it would cost double the usual amount due to the extra resources committed, to the extra fees for expediting testing, shipping, and so on.
Talk To Us About Your Needs And Let’s Plan For The Right Approach
