What steps should you take to transform your product design processes so you can develop smarter products?
Tech-Clarity’s Top Five Tips to Transform Product Design for Smarter Products shares advice to help companies on their journey to develop smarter products. For many, making products smarter and connected is a key product trend that is becoming increasingly important for innovation and competitive differentiation. Plus many customers are starting to expect it. However, successfully developing smarter and connected products requires changes to your design process. At the same time, it’s hard to know what you don’t know. As you embark on that journey toward smarter and connected products, there will be lots of lessons learned. Based on survey research, Tech-Clarity has identified five tips to give you some hindsight and help you on that journey with the benefit of some of the lessons learned by other.
Please enjoy the summary* below.
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The Journey Toward New Development Approaches
The emergence of smart, connected technologies is enabling unprecedented innovation. We have public trash cans that let trash collectors know when they need to be emptied. Pill bottles that remind you to take your medication. Complex machinery that notifies you when it needs servicing. The opportunities and growth potential seem limitless. Technology has become so critical, 52% of companies developing smart products fear losing market share unless they continually make products smarter. On top of that, 47% worry about reduced revenue.
With this in mind, we can expect to see a continual increase in the amount of software and electronics in products. Even 25% of companies that have not already made their products smarter, plan to add software and electronics over the next five years.
To successfully take advantage of the opportunity and transform products into intelligent systems, companies should embark on a journey to perfect development processes and manage the additional complexity. This eBook outlines steps to make your journey to transform your products a success.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
While emerging technologies open doors for innovation and opportunity, they introduce new challenges. However, as you start your journey, it is hard to know what you don’t know. Learning from the experiences of others to minimize or avoid common challenges should be a first step. Even if you have already started your journey, knowing where to focus your energy for improvement can minimize risk. Based on the experiences of over 180 manufacturers, the top six challenges of making smarter products are:
- Products become much more complex
- Knowledge silos / lack of cross-functional knowledge
- Ensuring product requirements are met
- Lack of visibility into the impact of design decisions across disciplines
- Tools are incompatible across engineering disciplines
- Identifying system level problems sooner
These challenges create barriers during your journey to improve your development process. Overcoming them requires putting the right processes and technology in place.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the eBook and does not contain the full content. A link to download the full eBook is available above. If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the research, please contact us using the “Contact” link below.