productize

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Productizing Clean-Tech

April 21, 2011 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Had the opportunity yesterday to attend the Clean Energy Expo up in Fort Collins, sponsored by the Clean Energy Supercluster at Colorado State University.  Had in my mind that I would do some networking and maybe even a little clandestine reverse selling of Zebulon Solutions productization services to the clean-tech companies exhibiting there.  Instead I got a good education on the challenges faced by clean-tech entrepreneuers from luminaries like Bill Ritter, the former governor of Colorado, and Dr. Sam Baldwin, Chief Science Officer for renewable energy at the DOE, as well as some distinguished members of the CSU faculty and various entrepreneurs. Some takeaways:

1. Raising money for clean-tech is tough.  Long time to volume combined with the lack of a pricing premium when selling to early adopters makes this tough.  Add in uncertainty in government support (some interesting graphs showing how wind energy installations gyrates year after year based on tax credit status) and general low R&D spending by energy companies.

1.1 Raising money for clean-tech in Colorado is even tougher.  In California, VCs match every dollar of DOE funding for clean-tech with $2.  In Boston its $4.  In Colorado its $0.12.  Ouch

2 There are some intriguing technologies out there.  But there are lots of milestones for these emerging companies to hit before they get to productization, before they get to market.  Technology hurdles, policy hurdles, climate change deniers, and relentless competition from cheap fossil fuels.

3. For those who defy science and want to believe that CO2 will not / does not cause global warming, here is an issue that may be a whole lot tougher to deny: all this CO2 in the air is leading to acidification of the oceans.  Basic chemistry, or so I am told.  Like a poorly kept swimming pool, the PH is dropping.    If the PH drops enough, marine life takes a hit. Basic biology.  Think devastation of fisheries…

3.1 For those who are not climate change deniers, acidification of the oceans may be an even worse nightmare. Think devastation of fisheries…

3.2 Oh yeah, and it’s coming soon, like 30 years. 

3.3 Worry. Care. Act.

4. Kudos to Governor Ritter for sticking with clean energy when he left the governor’s mansion.  It’s clearly not the path to quick money in lobbying or even big oil that many other exiting politicians take.

In terms of productization, I foresee a massive demand for our services–DFMEAs, validation testing, supply chain development and the like. Clean-energy products will need to be reliable, manufacturable, and really really cheap to compete with fossil fuels.  They will need to be well tested and proven out to compete with 50-year-old technologies.  They will have complex supply chains, hopefully a good portion of which will be domestic.  But it will take some time to mature, to flourish.

We’re already working in this area; we have five clean-tech customers by latest count, mostly smaller projects. Some neat products: electric bikes, industrial equipment that uses CO2 for cleaning, hybrid motor electronics.  We’re doing DFMEAs, supply chain development, design reviews, and helping with business plans. But many of these customers have other challenges too, raising capital ranking high on nearly every list.

We’re in this for the long haul; hopefully a lot of others are too.

Chuck

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The Nether World of NoTest

June 14, 2010 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

Ever ventured unwittingly into the shadow world of NoTest? It’s the hazy utopia where the ivory tower types proclaim that if the design is good and manufacturing is good then why test.  Sometimes this even came up in a snarky way, back when I worked in an integrated contract design and manufacturing (CDM) environment, as in “You did my design and you’re going to manufacture it, so then you don’t need test . And oh by the way take the test line item out of the open book pricing I made you provide.”  Followed by a sneer, or at least I envision a sneer in my memory when I think back unfondly on those days.

Of course doing without test in the real world is, well, fantasy.

Don’t get me wrong I’m a huge fan of doing a solid design, employing six sigma techniques where cost effective, and conducting serious design validation testing long before production release.  I’m also a fan of spending the effort needed to productize a design–get it ready for production and get production ready for the design.  But despite best efforts and intentions, I am also a believer in both Murphy, he of that oft quoted Law, and also in statistics, which basically say that even with a robust design and a low DPM (defect per million) manufacturing yield loss there are still product that will fail, and its better to know about a failure sooner rather than later.

Of course the level of test absolutely should be commensurate with the product robustness, yield issues, and the total cost of field failures (which while high are not infinite) including impact on brand, returns, customer satisfaction.  And while in reality NoTest is an extreme that is rarely ventured, many companies do neglect developing and implementing a production test plan that is as robust as their design methods and production practices. Often times this is due to lack of understanding of how test works; sometimes its part of the “beat up your contract manufacturer,” and all too often it’s just part of the productization chasm that widens with time as design teams and their manufacturing counterparts drift further and further part. (for more on this see our productization blog on the chasm analogy, http://zebulonsolutions.com/productizationblog/?p=41).

The right solution is really to put the same effort into making sure your test plan is robust as you do for design, marketing or any other function.  Start with requirements, look at tradeoffs, come up with a draft plan, scour it for cost effectiveness and get buy in from the cross functional team.  Make sure the risk / reward equation is properly balanced, and, as my Swedish friends would say, make sure the amount of test is lagom–neither too much nor too little.  And avoid the sirens as they lure you toward the shadowy land of NoTest.

Chuck

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Designing with Unobtainium

June 2, 2010 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

With all due respect to the Avatar movie, unobtainium is not something only found on Pandora.  In fact it’s designed into many products every year right here on planet Earth.  For those of us who identified this mysterious substance years ago, in fact the movie was a bummer as it took away the punch line of a favorite inside joke within the productization community. “Hey, she designed that widget out of unobtainium.  He he.” Or some such–I never claimed to be good with jokes.

In the very real world of product development, designing with unobtainium happens all to often.  Sometimes its literally a material choice; other times an unreachable tolerance spec; all too often its not literally unobtainable just way to expensive for the application.   The last example is frankly the most common–designing in a material used by NASA for some new consumer widget is an overused but nonetheless often accurate analogy.

I recently crossed paths witha  company that had indeed designed their latest consumer widget in part out of unobtainium.  Their prestigious industrial designer had designed a product look that garnered rave reviews, hundreds of thousands of web site hits, and the eternal thanks for the sales team which now had customers beating the proverbial path to their door.  Just one little hitch–no one could make the critical part.  Literally no one: to date three top suppliers had tried and more or less given up.  With a NASA supplier waiting in the wings. The sad thing is that there are probably 100s of ways to modify  the spec to yield a product that is equally attractive, yet everyone kept beating their heads against the “why can’t you meet the spec?” wall.

To all such problems of course there are eventually solutions, but all too often at a great cost and considerable hit to schedule.  It would be far better to take into account the impact of the various specs on vendor pool, costs, yield, throughput and lead time early in the design process.  As in this example, starting to think about this even in the concept stage, with the industrialization engineer sitting side by side with the industrial designer, could in many cases lead to an equally cool design yet one that could be easily built with non fictional materials.

What stories do you have on designing with unobtainium, or designing out unobtainium?

Chuck

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I productized our coffee pot today

March 10, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

I like coffee.  Some would say it’s from my  years of living in Sweden and drinking 6 mugs of Skånerost a day.  Some would say it’s because our office here at Zebulon Solutions is located above a roaster and we smell the fresh roasted coffee every day (shameless plug: www.mountainsedgecoffee.com). Regardless, when we set up shop here in Berthoud, we splurged on a nice coffee brewing system. Makes espresso, steams milk and makes a mean cup of regular coffee, thanks to a Swedish inspired cone filter system. And of course fresh roasted Ethiopian Harrar beans from Mountain’s Edge Coffee doesn’t hurt.

But today I productized our coffee pot .  Too bad the manufacturer didn’t do that first.  You see, while this fancy technology brews great coffee, there is one problem–the actual coffee pot, the carafe, is a dud.  It all has to do with the 5 cent plastic part on top–it was not designed right. The pour would always spill and the snap for the attachment pin was wrong and fixing to break. So this morning I took out our trusty Dremel and made a few modifications.  Now it pours fine.

The moral of this story is not to dremel out your post consumer products, rather that the manufacturer produced great technology but stumbled on turning it into a great product.

Gonna go pour myself another cup of Harrar.  From our modified coffee pot.

Chuck

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More Productization Definitions

February 24, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

This has been the hot topic the last few weeks, both in the ether and also at the NoCo Entre meetup earlier this week (see previous blog) where we got some lively feedback on the topic.  Here’s a list of productization definitions (or product realization) some more tongue in cheek than others:

  1. Turning R&D projects into manufacturable products
  2. Taking a concept and turning it into a production stable product
  3. Turning a science project into a real product
  4. Turning nearly done into done done
  5. What still needs to be finished after R&D says its done
  6. The gap between design and manufacturing
  7. The design phase is usually where 80% of the product development effort is typically spent. The final industrialization phase is where 80% of the problems typically occur. Productization is what is done to remedy this imbalance.
  8. Make stuff work
  9. The art of taking products from nearly done to really done
  10. The remaining 80% of the product development effort after design says a product is finished…
  11. “No results found for productization: Did you mean predigestion?” (www.dictionary.com)

Other definitions? What do you think?

Chuck

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Searching for productization

January 22, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

Try searching for the term “productization” on the web.  I did, and I didn’t find much.  Dictionary.com didn’t know the term; the web site productization.com is for sale, and of all things a translation to Russian showed up on the first page of a Google search.  I did find an abstract for a thesis from a Finnish grad student researching the linguistic origins of the word “productization”–interesting stuff but the full thesis wasn’t posted.

http://tucs.fi/publications/insight.php?id=licSuominen09a

Wiktionary.com did have a definition, which is actually quite good: “The act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool internal to an organization, to make it suitable as a commercial product”

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/productization

So for those of us who always have thought that productization is an unappreciated art–yup, looks like that’s true.  So let’s do something to change that; to bring productization up into the light of day, to show the world why it pays to not neglect productization during product design and development.

Chuck

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