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Time-to-Market and Time-to-Volume: critical success factors for product launches
As product innovation is absolutely fundamental to the market, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) struggle to keep pace with consumers whose demands for new phones and product replacement are growing at a high rate. Manufacturing is regarded less and less as a source of competitive advantage for OEMs. Product innovation, brand image and product sales are more recognized as the differentiators needed to secure market share. OEMs need to introduce new products to market and sell certain volumes at the right time, and ahead of their competitors. To support this, they require a versatile and agile supply chain that is ready to start moving products in large volumes to cater to market demand.
It is an industrial norm that a delay of a few months makes a whole program unprofitable. Time-to-Market and Time-to-Volume are primary concerns of the handset industry. Timt-to-Market is critical due to launch costs and contractual obligations. Reliable Time-to-Volume is vital in that it allows OEMs to fully achieve their Time-to-Market targets. Time-to-volume is the time it takes to get a product to achieve full scale volume manufacturing. It includes design, sourcing, prototyping, and ramp-up. It is not only how fast a product gets to volume manufacturing, but also how accurately a company predicts the length of time it will take to get there in order for the customer to prepare and plan its product marketing activities. Cutting corners to quickly reach volume manufacturing usually produces high failure rates, products that do not meet market expectations, and many complications along the way.
Many of the world’s most successful OEMs outsource to enable them to focus on their core business to sustain their business profitability. In choosing an outsourcing partner, they often make their selection on reliable, predictable and cost-effective service rather than manufacturing capacity. Only the outsourcing partner that can maintain product quality, on-time delivery and reliable Time-to-Market and time-to-volume can constantly live up to the promises the OEM makes to its customers.
The outsourcing partner should help the OEM to anticipate future customer and market demands and emerging technologies. To offer maximum flexibility to its customers, the outsourcing partner should provide integrated end-to-end services that cover the whole life cycle of its customer’s products. It must be able to provide a wide variety of electronics and customized mechanics-related services, integrating these through professional product and program management. In addition, it should have mechanisms in place to do volume manufacturing, and have extensive global resources available to provide rapid response to any changes in capacity and services. This allows OEMs to optimize their supply chains without incurring restructuring costs and within a more guaranteed time frame.
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Topics:
Communication Technology, Contract manufacturing, ems, IEMS, Tiime-to-Market, Time-to-Volume, TTM, TTV
