The Battle for Design Wins
Here's a primer on some of the newest Web-based tools you can use to increase your company's share of design wins.
For a direct materials manufacturer, few business achievements rank higher in importance than that of capturing a design win. And for today's manufacturers, many new opportunities for achieving design wins are now coming from the Web through new types of tools that take advantage of the Web's potential for interactivity and its ability to exchange rich graphics and textual data.
Here's a look at some of the newest Web-based tools and what they can do to increase your business' share of design wins.
Capturing a Design Win
Say you're a manufacturer of temperature sensors, and one of your product divisions sells into the automotive industry. Right now, your largest customer is working on the electrical design for next year's model, and that model will use an upgraded electrical system. Meanwhile, your designers are working on a new sensor that would be ideal for that design. It's not in production yet, but it's close enough to being complete that you can offer it to the automaker's electrical design team.
What you're hoping for is, of course, a design win. If the automaker's designers decide to use your sensor, they will then specify it for their design. Their design, once approved, may become that maker's electrical-system standard for the next five years. That translates into a lot of sensors and a substantial, dependable revenue stream for your product division.
So what are your chances of securing this, or any other design win? They're excellent, no matter what industry you're in. Surveys show that between 80 and 90 percent of the parts included in early-stage design end up in the final product. It's well worth it for you to get your sensors or relays, switches, door handles or other parts into the hands of your prospect's design engineers as soon as possible.
Tool #1: Interactive Product Catalog
But what if, as in the example above, you haven't put your part into production? That's OK, as long as you can give the design engineer enough detailed information to feel confident the part will work and fit when the time comes.
Today's design engineers understand this, and they also know the Web is a handy medium for looking into suppliers' parts and assemblies. Traditional, paper-based catalogs are frequently out of date because of their static nature. By contrast, the Web gives parts makers a dynamic medium. Thanks to the interactive product catalog, they can now update parts listings at any time, either when a new design becomes available or before a new part is produced.
The online, interactive product catalog represents a new generation of Web-based tools one that's a definite step up from first-generation online exchanges and auctions.
Exchanges and auctions are good at grouping parts together and for presenting them to design engineers. But exchanges and auctions don't have the ability to present much more than the names, numbers, dimensions and prices of the parts they show. For commodity items, this is generally sufficient. But for more complex parts, it's not. Here's where the interactive product catalog earns its keep.
Picture this: A design engineer, shopping for a temperature sensor, finds your Web site. You've got an interactive product catalog that lets the designer download a computer-aided design (CAD) model of one of your newest sensors. The designer inspects your model, rotates it, analyzes it, zooms in and out, and places it into a larger assembly model of the new auto's electrical system to check tolerances. The designer decides to build your sensor into the new auto design, and quickly imports your solid model into the working CAD model of the auto.
Not only do you get a design win, but you also get it without expending any extra effort or costly resources. And you get it because your design was in the right place at the right time that is, it was in an interactive product catalog.
