Start-up Engineer and Industrial Product Design

Another concern is vendor relations.

how much to pay [ acceptable quality ]

will deliveries be on time

terms of payment at time of order cod ,30,60,90 days

econominies of scale

& then there is user interface

& ease of repair

spare parts availability

Always good to hear from you Shyam, you keep thinking about how to nuture the next generation

Dear Garthh

I agree that customer satisfaction is something very essential. Due to inventory avoidance, these days, 45-days to 90-days is common delivery time for small items and rarely one finds off the self items with traders or manufacturers. While products are always in the process of manufacturing, they are meant for some one who have booked ahead of time. Stocking the goods means loss to the manufacturer and trader both.

On the contrary when some one want to pay, also wants the delivery on hand and becomes restless after making payment.

I will prefer 45-days time schedule to 90-days time schedule for deliveries rather than immediate deliveries unless something is in stock for some reason different from manufacturing and stocking.

In India I pay 12% interest to the bank yearly, which means 1% per month. If I delay sale for 6 months then it add up 6% in interest and loses, which is pretty high if your net gain is say 10% and it gets reduced to 4%. If stocked for an year then loss will be 2%. Simple rule that no stock is maintained and produce for pending deliveries makes you at 100% and some time some advance is given to you to avoid bank interest. Assuming that one will take 60 days to get money, will cause 2% reduction in profit.

Other point is also valid, which tells about the services. Very often customer will say, your product is not working because one does not know a proper way to operate. You will send a man only to find there was nothing wrong and this adds up the cost. Hence, never sell a product where your men can not reach easily and requires repair at service point. Always ask for reshipment of the part to factory.

One big part of the business is advertisement. Without education, your client does not know about your product or your ability. This is something very wise thing to do and is essential loss in business and is rather a part of the investment in future.

Getting investors is a serious problem. You have an idea and tell every one that it can bring lots of money and no one takes it for granted. Perhaps, money making money is a serious part of the business and return to investors brings more money in time. No return means pressure of asking back money. While it is easy to waste few years in business, but investors will not wait that long. Hence, plan for return each year to the investors. What should be the size of investment one may ask from investors? Perhaps one should also consider this point. Taking extra finance does not make extra money.

If I take money from bank and manufacture goods and stock for possible sale on speculations then I am digging my grave for sure. Avoid all such things in business. Only highly experienced people with lots of average business can take risk of stocking on the bases of their sale history. This sometime may also put them to bankruptcy.

As far as the problems one will face as a new engineer I dont believe that any of those would be a main problem, except marketing due to lack of experience. Without the experience the person will have to learn on their own trial and error inwhich an senior had already gone through. Personally I think that the hardest part is developing a stable circuit (both electrically and mech.) and assembly (designed to be able to be taken apart with ease). Eg. Automatic door opener: the entire circuit and control has to be based on fitting into a small tight area. This causes the designer to make/change the shape of the circuit board and/or change the mechanical aspect to achieve workable conditions.

Creating a Professional look i think lies more in the persons imagination. At my work, everyone always make cables for test equipment with just zipties. I being only a co-op decided to use a straided mesh sleeve with shrink wrap which protects the wire and looks much more professional. I think the same applys to the quality aspect. When I first got there everyone made circuits on these little preettched boards held in by solder and wire, none the less messy, and I made all my circuits on larger breadboards held down by counter sunk screws, very nice.

In any case a new engineer can benifet from the insight of a more experienced engineer, but of course this depends on the person.

Every engineer [or company] develops there own prefered methods [bag of tricks]. Learning to use components that are on hand or off the major suppliers shelf[obtainium ] will always keep the costs of production down. developing methods of manufacture , It's important to do it in a way that will be involve the minimum amount of craftmanship possible to obtain reproducable quality assemblies. [ keep it simple stupid ] KISS

Dear IAR

I fully agree that even a cable that one attached to the circuit is very important and often ignored by the startup industrialists. I got some BNC cables made through my junior from teflon Coaxial cables and he did not use the heat shrink sleeve top and cables often pull off out of the connectors and users were annoyed. I got 434MHz antenna from a company with SMA connectors and good heat shrink sleeve and these cables are working well for the last 10 years. I can admire the work of other company and some one hates the product of mine and I need to redo the work. This is very important and adds up the cost of resupply. Taking care in the design is slow process, but at the end brings smile on some face.

Keeping circuit small to fit to size also helps, however its reliability is more essential. You can get 10 cent watch and 1000$ omega watch so both fit in small casing and you know why to pay that big pocket money and yet keep smiling.

Your point is well taken.