{"id":7690,"date":"2015-01-27T16:20:19","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T16:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/?p=7690"},"modified":"2015-01-27T16:20:19","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T16:20:19","slug":"product_design_trade-offs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/technique\/product_design_trade-offs\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing technical design trade-offs during product development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While fast time-to-market, low product cost and high-quality technical specification are all key factors when launching new products, the process of making design decisions usually involves\u00a0a trade-off between software and\u00a0hardware.<\/p>\n<p>Electronics is an art. Give multiple engineers the same specification and they will often create multiple different solutions\u00a0that meet the specification perfectly. One design engineer may have considered unit cost as the most important factor while\u00a0another will have designed the product to minimise development cost.<\/p>\n<p>For a winning design that meets all its\u00a0requirements, the design engineer needs to balance all three factors of technical specification, development cost and unit price, taking the following considerations into account from the start:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Time to market<\/li>\n<li>Available development budget<\/li>\n<li>Target market sale price<\/li>\n<li>Anticipated sales volumes<\/li>\n<li>Value in exceeding or modifying the specification<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As many of these factors can be little more than wild guesses, they can skew a design engineer\u2019s decisions \u2013 particularly when the expected volume is unknown. Here, initial planning for the product, where units will be built in large numbers, means that the focus is on unit cost. However, if time to market is key then the design engineer may\u00a0decide to use off-the-shelf, modular hardware, at the expense of unit price and technical specification.<\/p>\n<p>A design engineer\u2019s choice of components can have a major impact on the time taken to develop the software. In embedded designs, using more costly components such as modular microprocessor solutions with production-ready board support packages, rather than creating a design with components and reference software only, helps cut\u00a0the software development time, and vice versa. This often leads to\u00a0a straight fight between development time and unit cost. When deciding which trade-offs to make, the design engineer\u2019s first priority must always be to identify exactly what is being traded though.<\/p>\n<p>Figure 1 represents\u00a0a\u00a0product development process that would result in an\u00a0over-engineered and expensive product, which would nonetheless last longer than a lower-cost, less-developed alternative.<\/p>\n<em>No URL for image<\/em>\n<p>Understanding project risk is also important as design engineers consider the technical design trade-offs. The development cost of a product is typically directly proportional to the time it takes so, when overruns happen, you\u2019re being hit twice &#8211; once by\u00a0rising costs and once\u00a0by a lengthening time to market.<\/p>\n<p>Fixed-price contracts, where the development team\u00a0\u00a0foot the bills for any overruns for which you are not responsible, can\u00a0minimise project risk. Another approach is to use third-party software libraries, which may reduce software development time but\u00a0increase unit cost.<\/p>\n<p>To minimise the\u00a0bill-of-materials cost\u00a0often involves allowing a degree of experimentation, which takes an uncertain amount of time. There are various risks with this approach: to the customer&#8217;s timescale; to the contractor who has quoted a fixed price yet faces unknown costs; and to engineering teams who face similarly uncertain internal costs. To this end, optimising the bill of materials cost is often best done after the technical design goals have been met, so that the impact on time to market is reduced.<\/p>\n<p>Making decisions about\u00a0product development can appear to be a circular process, as a design team gradually narrows its focus on to the\u00a0best platforms to use. At each stage, you may\u00a0find that making a\u00a0decision that improves one factor has adverse effects on another. The best moment in product development is when a decision you take actually helps voercome\u00a0multiple problems at once. Then you can say you have truly learnt the art of\u00a0the\u00a0trade-off.<\/p>\n<h2>Author<\/h2>\n<p>Dunstan Power is director of\u00a0ByteSnap Design. Power is a chartered electronics engineer who\u00a0graduated with a degree in engineering from Cambridge University. He has been working in the electronics industry since 1992. In 2004, Power\u00a0founded Diglis Design, an electronic design consultancy, where he developed many electronic board and FPGA designs. In 2008, Power\u00a0teamed up with former colleague Graeme Wintle to establish ByteSnap Design, which\u00a0supplies integrated software development and embedded design services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Understanding design trade-offs can help achieve the correct balance of functionality, cost, and time to market, says design consultancy chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":329,"featured_media":7693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242],"tags":[1578,1532,1675,1674,1676],"coauthors":[996],"class_list":["post-7690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-architecture-design","tag-design-cost","tag-hardware-software-co-design","tag-platforms-2","tag-trade-offs","tag-ttm","workflow-expert-blog","workflow-op-ed","workflow-up-to-date"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7690"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}