Some examples, completely real, of which pits start-ups which developing hardware products are falling into due to a lack of operational thinking combined at the development stages of the product:
1. Planning for the entire product life cycle – a company has not defined in-depth and has not written the maintenance and operation procedures of its future product… During development (two years), a gap is created between business planning, that the product will be maintained by an unskilled personal. On the other hand, the development that did not receive requirements and planning the use of non-skilled personnel in complicated work and thus built on a professional personal (and thus expensive) in order to close the product’s performance gaps.
2. The transfer of prototypes to mass production – Prototypes are very different from products; lots of companies are simply moving prototypes to production. In prototype design, you don’t take into account what components are available on the market. How many alternatives each component has, in order to create flexibility. Which component has better environmental conditions? How easy it is to make the pieces. Usually, our first step in an organization is to mark which components are not suitable for the production, and change the product accordingly. It’s a process that takes between three months and six months. For example: a company in a product intended for the environment in extreme conditions has selected simple components that are insufficient to work below zero degrees. Another example – setting up very small tolerances for parts in non-critical places, which pushed up the price.
3. Requirements liquidity– this is the most common and dangerous phenomenon. Because HW prototypes can be made quickly but it is very difficult to make a market-ready product. The CEO or product manager changes the product requirements according to what they see fit or infer from the meeting with the customers. The outcome is changing requirements and development begins to develop without defined goals. Usually, the development reaches stagnation and goes nowhere.
4. Failure to build a suitable operational environment – A company that assembles its products in small quantities has received an order to assemble five times the current monthly production capacity for two years. The simple solution, we will increase the production line by five times and we will manage…. All the supportive functions just collapsed -production line management, workmanship quality, material tracking, procurement, inventory coverage, warehouse and shipments. Mostly the bottleneck is not in assembly but in the supportive processes, and IT systems that support the growth process.
