How CEMs can help manage product lifecycle

By Phil Burns and Mike Fitzgerald, Controlled Speed Engineering

In today’s competitive environment, contract manufacturers need to do all they can to help their customers and to add value. One important service that CEMs can provide is to help design engineers manage the product lifecycle, improving the product’s performance, reducing cost and handling environmental issues.

By applying leading edge technologies and techniques, CEMs are increasingly using their R&D teams to help customers make the best use of the most advanced assembly techniques, processes and packaging.

It’s also important to pick the right solution for each product, and here at Controlled Speed we can provide expert advice.

Mid-life product refreshes
While companies may put the majority of their effort into designing and launching new products, it’s also important to consider changes that can be made during the product’s life.

Businesses need to ensure they are able to deliver the price/value equation that customers demand, so that they can profitably sell sufficient volume of a product to meet their marketing objectives. They must also respond to competitor offerings that may be launched or improved during a product lifecycle, in terms of performance, features and price.

By refreshing a product in mid-life, new technologies and components can be incorporated, which can improve performance, and can enable the introduction of lower cost alternatives over previous product generations whilst ensuring backwards compatibility

With innovative and proven R&D capabilities, Controlled Speed can help customers to integrate leading edge technologies and techniques. This enables them to re-spin their products as often as possible to maintain barriers to entry, reduce cost, add new features and improve the competitiveness of their products. Overall, this can mean that the effective, profitable lifecycle of a product can be substantially extended.

The product lifecycle
The complete lifecycle of a product can summarised as:
• product design and development
• prototyping
• productionisation
• assembly
• test
• logistics
• distribution
• aftersales
• end-of-life
• environmental disposal

Productionisation is one area where the CEM can make itself extremely useful, taking a development, pre-production design and moving it on to be a fully finished product that is ready for volume manufacture.

As well as purely design issues, productionisation can include full system build, including boxes, cables and connectors. It can also include encapsulation or conformal coating, protecting the board against the ingress of dust and water (to ensure appropriate IP ratings) and reducing flammability risks.

Aftersales includes warranty returns and repairs, and CEMs are often involved to help manage any returns, and to carry out the necessary repairs. It almost goes without saying that the CEM should ensure the design-for-manufacture stage has included reliability and low returns as an objective.

End-of-life issues are becoming increasingly important, particularly with new legislation such as the WEEE Directive that places a responsibility on the producer to handle recycling products when they become waste.

Environmental issues
Environmental rules and legislation are a relatively new area for management to consider, and today’s consumer market also means that making environmentally-friendly designs can be a positive selling point.

The recent European Union directive on the eco-design of Energy-using Products (EuP) sets new requirements for environmentally-friendly design. As its name suggests, this only applies to products that use energy, so not all products are included. The EuP directive encourages manufacturers to use a considered approach to product design in several areas: where are the raw materials sourced from, what's the energy used in extracting them, what's the process of making the components, how far are they transported, and what's going to happen at the end of their life. The CEM can help ensure that its customers meet their requirements under the EuP directive in all of these areas as far as is possible.

EuP also requires companies to look at the efficiency and eco-friendliness of the product itself. Managed correctly, the CEM can ensure this is a win-win for its customers, by combing environmental improvements with cost reduction, and improving efficiency while reducing emissions and waste. For example, at Controlled Speed we continually look to reduce component count on all products, thus reducing the environmental impact as well as the cost.

Another area where CEMs can help customers is to source components locally where possible. With the UK and Europe being very aware of eco issues, local sourcing can help improve overall environmental performance

Managing obsolescence
Obsolescence is a concept that is generally well-understood, but no less important because of that. The lifecycle of a product can vary widely across different markets, but it’s essential that companies plan ahead and are able to respond to changes in component availability. Controlled Speed can play a vital role in keeping up to date with the latest information from suppliers on issues like last-time buys, and helping ensure component obsolescence does not become a problem.

Legislation and certification
Legislation is becoming increasingly important in electronics manufacture, particularly in environmental issues such as EuP and RoHS compliance. CEMs can become experts in these areas, to ensure they help their customers meet all the necessary standards, now and in the future.

CEMs also play an important role in helping products meet relevant certification, for example UL and EMC standards. At Controlled Speed, we work with several EMC test houses and help our customers through the EMC approvals process. Controlled Speed’s pre-compliance service can use the company’s experience to save customers considerable cost by highlighting any issues before they go to the EMC test house.

Conclusions
There are many areas where CEMs can help customers. As well as the technical skills of its R&D team, a CEM must also have the right approach to work successfully with a customer’s design engineers. Handled correctly, there are enormous benefits to be gained from the partnership of design team and CEM, in particular from re-spinning products part-way through their lifecycle.

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