TO PROTOTYPE, OR NOT TO PROTOTYPE? ACCELERATE YOUR NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

JOE ARNONE served as CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER during his time with RADIUS. Joe transitioned over to Jabil as Head of Center of Excellence for North America and still works closely with Radius.

Your startup based on your great idea just got funded. Congratulations. You’re one step ahead of the curve with a software/hardware combo that spells the future in your niche industry.

Your development team is busy writing code to power the software and make your UX a reality. But the industry you’re trying to disrupt relies on a physical product that moves in the real world, not just pixels and code on a cloud server. You take a good look at your management team and all you can see is gaps. Does your team have the industrial engineering chops to bring this product to market? And even if they do, your new disruptive business plan relies on a B2B approach of low volume, high-value sales. Your designers have delivered their initial designs, but you still have no idea if the hardware can be made to your strict specification at a set cost. Your business plan requires a steady but relatively low volume approach to manufacturing to match your B2B strategy. What you need is a first prototype they tell you. No, what you really need is a way to accelerate the time required to introduce your product – what we at Radius Innovation & Development call our “Accelerated Product Introduction” capability.

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Bring a new product to market fast and fulfill a vision that may have been years in the making.

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To bring a new product to market is a complex process that requires a special set of skills that differ from mass production manufacturing. In many cases, this specialized skill set could very well be lacking in your management team. But you shouldn’t feel bad about this all too common reality. Developing a new product is hard. It encompasses multiple disciplines and requires a complex and rigorous testing process.

These are some of the reasons why Radius created their Accelerated Product Introduction capability. This innovative idea combines the resources of Radius’ Low Volume Assembly Service with their Radius Digital Prototyping Lab, all while harnessing the talent and experience of the product design and engineering team of the Radius Innovation and Development studios.

We work directly with your team to ensure that the product being manufactured not only meets your specifications but that it fulfills your vision.

This innovative approach puts all the key factors needed to accelerate your product to market under one roof, and is focused on creating a flexible and robust strategy to put your product in your customer’s hands on time and on budget.

How to Achieve Great User Experience Design

Great user experience design must be deeply homed in research and innovation to deliver the most intuitive experience possible. Good UI/UX should just work, and work well.

Our close collaborative style not only ensures that our team understands your vision but also ensures that your team becomes familiar with every detail of the manufacturing process, enabling them to take advantage of improvements along the way.

When you work with our team of experts and our state-of-the-art equipment, you get the ability to quickly design, build, test and analyze your ideas and products. Our low volume assembly capabilities for as many as 10,000 units can deliver the right product much faster and with a reduced go-to-market risk.

Radius’ Low Volume Assembly (LVA) Capability

We have a modular and flexible manufacturing line designed to be easily modified as the manufacturing processes are refined.

This modular, flexible line design is not only well suited to accommodating maturing manufacturing processes, it also provides product launch cost savings. Unlike traditional mass production lines, which are designed for ongoing, uninterrupted manufacturing, our modular line can easily be pre-scheduled to be increased or decreased as needed. Traditional manufacturing lines, once set up, become client funded whether they are utilized or not. With our LVA modular line, if manufacturing is not occurring, we don’t pass any manufacturing costs to our client, resulting in substantial capital conservation.

The genius of the LVA process is that once your business takes off, and a manufacturing scale has been achieved, the entire process can be easily transitioned to a mass manufacturing location of choice, intact, and with minimal interruption.

Accelerated Product Introduction – Case Study: Aerial Mapping Drones

Our client is a high-resolution aerial mapping startup serving the construction industry. Their business model is to provide highly accurate and cutting-edge software-as-a-service for high-resolution mapping. Their innovation is to rely on drones to capture and map these construction sites versus using airplanes, which are more expensive to operate and come with large operational and logistical considerations. But what really sets them apart from the competition is their software-as-a-service pricing model.

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For one set monthly price, they give customers access to their mapping software, plus the use of a dedicated drone to conduct mapping operations. So, in effect, this startup is banking on an interesting combination of software-as-a-service and a strong hardware component that comes bundled as part of their monthly service fee. From a price-point perspective, the hardware is only there to facilitate the software-as-a-service operation.

These drones needed to operate in the rough environment of a construction site, under all weather conditions, all while carrying a sophisticated combination of high-resolution cameras plus software bundles to enable them to perform their primary function of capturing construction sites as accurately as possible. Adding further complexity, the drones needed to be built to withstand inclement weather, from the inside out, while also running sophisticated encryption and auto-pilot software. Because of the nature of the customer’s B2B software-as-a service business model, another requirement was that these drones had to be produced in sufficient numbers, but at a relatively low volume, so running a traditional manufacturing line (that generally produces millions of units) wasn’t really an option.

Enter Radius

This startup’s software-as-a-service/hardware combo challenge is precisely the type of problem that Radius’ Accelerated Product Introduction capability was designed to solve. We house a team with a mix of specializations, including engineering, UX, industrial design, software and more, all directly connected with our DPL (with the capability to create physical parts and prototypes on the spot). These capabilities feed into our modular and flexible Low Volume Assembly system to produce a steady flow of customer ready drones ready to start generating income at the relatively low volume pace of B2B sales.

This drone startup can now start developing and building their drones on an accelerated timeline due to the simple fact that all of these capabilities are available to them under one roof. This enables their team to review parts and processes as they are being manufactured and assembled in-house, thus saving countless hours and avoiding cost overruns. In addition, issues that may arise during development are nipped in the bud by a combination of quality control and in-house retooling in our DPL, thus eliminating the need to send parts back to a third party manufacturer and all the wasted time and money that would entail.

Low Volume Assembly is Good for Your Business

If your business (like this startup) relies on a steady flow of new hardware products manufactured to the highest standards, but the nature of your business requires low volume in terms of the hardware production, there was once a time that your options were extremely limited. Now, the powerful combination of Radius’ in-house engineering talent, combined with our Digital Prototype Lab capable of producing parts for Low Volume Assembly (all under one roof), enables Radius Innovation to give startups and established companies alike a new edge in this new world order of software & hardware as a service combos.

Learn more about how Radius can help develop your next product and bring it to market right, fast, and with minimum risk.

Innovation. Realized. Rapidly.