Titoma Design Releases the News Article for Its New Product Development Knowledge Center- 10 Ways to Lower the Cost of Your Electronic Product

Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 13, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Lowering the cost of your electronic device is especially crucial to offset lower sales and maintain your competitive edge during these difficult times.

Here are 10 different strategies which over the years have proven to deliver the best value for money.

1. Eliminate unnecessary complexity
Your product does not have to meet 100% of the wishes of 100% of all people. As Apple demonstrates it’s not necessarily the product with the most features which commands the highest margin. In fact, Steve Jobs famously quipped that “Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things.” For many new products, satisfying 80% of functionality demanded is more than enough. Do not get trapped trying to satisfy each and every wish of that one clamorous prospect, if in fact most of the customers do not really need them and you wind up paying for the cost of all these unnecessary bells and whistles.

2. Leverage existing platforms
Make use of existing technologies instead of starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel. For most products, there are factories already making something which comes pretty close and can be customized to fit your requirements, user interface, and styling. Not only does this ensure you pay less in development fees but it also avoids a lot of debugging, and so speeds up time to market. Bear in mind though that a factory’s priority is to sell their product and the number of units you want to produce will have to be incentive enough for them to customize the device and reconfigure their production line.

3. Simplify mechanical design
In their relentless drive to lower assembly time engineers in the West often come up with very complex parts. But as labor is still very affordable in China you are often better off splitting the part in two, the cost of a really complex mold is a lot higher than that of two simple ones, and far outweighs the savings in assembly cost, especially if you are producing in batches of say 5K.

4. Design electronics in Asia
In many markets the only way to be cost competitive is to design for low cost manufacturing in China right from the start. Once the whole design has already been completed and certified in the West it will be very hard to achieve substantial cost savings China, because it would take a lot of time and effort to re-do the design for Asian components and manufacturing methods. Another issue is that the most cost effective IC’s are those produced by companies such as Allwinner, Holtek and a host of other brands an engineer in the West has never heard off, let alone be able to design a board around it without any support, since that support unfortunately often only comes in Chinese.

5. Embrace standard parts
Use off-the-shelf parts and modules as much as possible. Since almost every product is made in China these days there is a also a complete supply chain supporting for almost everything, and there are very few parts which cannot be sourced ready-made, at prices you can never get close to using a custom design. If you manage to standardize on parts over your various products you will realize further savings on material handling, purchasing, and inventory management, while you can also expect discounts when purchasing in larger volumes.

Read another five strategies here:
www.titoma.com.tw/10_Ways_to_Lower_the_Cost_of_Your_Electronic_Product.php

Titoma Design takes on the complete design and manufacturing of your electronic products in Asia. Our end-to-end solutions include product design, engineering, programming, prototyping, mold making, certifications, mass manufacturing and logistics.

Titoma has Western designers, engineers and project managers permanently based in Taiwan and China. We know how to get things done right in this part of the world. With Titoma you’re in good hands.