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Designing for Profitability
October 2, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Let’s start with this 1991 quote from Hewlett Packard: “Managers in marketing, manufacturing and especially research and development at HP are becoming more aware that they jointly manage a cross-functional process. Their people define and design a product and develop processes to manufacture and market that product.”
The only thing that would be different today is the first word, which would now read “stakeholders,” because even the term “employees” doesn't describe the interconnected web of internal and external design talent that goes into making a product today.
HP used their experience in product design to improve what they called break-even time (BET), which is the time to when their shipping product paid for all the development work and started to make a net profit. Many people use different metrics today, but they all boil down to some form of BET and this is as important today as it was in 1991.
So what can we as partners in the design process do to increase the profitability of our designs? I don't see how I can make a list of do's and don'ts that will work in every case, because I have found that every situation is just different enough that the list won't fit correctly and will need to be modified; but I can share with you the things that have made a real difference in my design process and where I would like to go next.Read the full article here.Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.