SUMMARY
An outdoor cooking industry leader famous for their line of kettle-grill-makers wanted to venture into the smart appliances industry and had requested PCI to manufacture and launch their new product to market using just nine months. Meeting the tight timeline to accelerate the product’s time-to-market, we also lowered product outlays through reducing material and assembly costs, bringing cost-savings and higher profit margins to our partner. With our help, our partner managed to expand their product offerings and entered a new market to reach new customers as a result.
THE CHALLENGE: A RACE AGAINST TIME AND COST OBJECTIVES TO MEET
When a world leading provider in high-end outdoor cooking appliances approached us to launch their new product—a smart cookware—the challenges were to have its design ready for production in nine months whilst meeting cost objectives. We acted as our partner’s design consultant and were integrated into their engineering team to provide design development support in mechanical engineering (pertaining to tool design and sheet metal fabrication), design for manufacturing and design for quality.
THE SOLUTION: PRODUCT DESIGN EXPERTISE AND CREATIVE MATERIAL SOURCING
With our expertise in wireless connectivity design and manufacturing, we assisted in PCB layout and had sourced for the best cost and performance components for smart home devices including component consolidation between multiple SKUs. Our design experience in Human Machine Interface (HMI) contributed to the product development including LCD selection and keypad design. The design of multiple SKU smart cookware assemblies was completed on time to meet scheduled production start date.
To reduce material and assembly costs, we integrated a supplier who could provide a 3-in-1 power input solution to replace a separate switch, fuse holder and power input receptacle. The bill of materials (BOM) of multiple SKUs were also examined and compared to consolidate common materials to achieve cost-savings for our partner.
THE IMPACT: NEW PRODUCT OFFERINGS, A NEW MARKET AND NEW CUSTOMERS
The smart cookware was launched on reduced time-to-market and the cost reduction efforts we had implemented brought significant cost-savings and higher profit margins to our partner. Venturing into another market with the new smart cookware, our partner was able to expand their product offerings with a new line of smart appliances to add to their product portfolio and more importantly, tap into the smart appliance market to reach new customers.