If you’re part of an organization that’s scaling to production, we’ve got you covered with our scalable cloud PLM solution.

But what if you’re just starting out? You need to capture and document parts, but without changes and a supply chain to manage, you may not be ready to implement a full-service solution. You may just need something that helps you design and document a prototype, or turn your parts into BOMs.

For people like you, we created PartsList.

Why PartsList?

In the last year, we noticed a lack of engineer-focused systems that individuals and small teams could use to document and share their designs. We hope to change all that with PartsList—a new cloud application that makes it easy to document, organize and share BOMs.

PartsList is a low cost tool for engineers who just need to find parts, document a BOM and get it to doc control (or a partner, vendor or friend). Since we launched in January, we’ve been getting an enthusiastic response, and a lot of early traction, which has been really exciting to see.

As the product manager of PartsList, I’d like to give you a tour of PartsList, so you can see how it can help you get your prototype built. At this point in time, we’re letting new users try PartsList for free, so if you think you might be interested, set up your account today.

What are some cool things you can do with PartsList?

When we created PartsList we had design engineers in mind.

The use case for PartsList begins with an engineer who needs to get his/her full circuit design from EDA or ECAD documented. (Or an engineer who needs to document a napkin drawing, reference BOM or a parts list in a spreadsheet.) From there, PartsList can be used to:

Complete the documentation process for an existing bill of materials

Export a BOM from ECAD, import it into PartsList and use Autofill to collect datasheets and vendor site information for your entire BOM in one click. For any given part, all you need is the manufacturer and manufacturer number to capture the rest of the information—including datasheets and links to purchase—with the click of a button.

When you’re done, export the BOM to CSV or PDX to share it with whoever needs it. (And if you’re unfamiliar with PDX, here is more information on how you can use PDX to share build packages.)

Consider multiple critical component contenders

PartsList comes with PartSaver—a bookmarklet that you can use to capture and save critical part information with one click. If you’re browsing parts online, you can use the PartSaver browser button to capture critical component information—including datasheets and vendor information, and make comparative evaluation easy.

Create a new Bill of Materials

If you want to start a BOM from scratch, you can find the parts individually online, and use PartSaver to capture all the data into a unique list.

It’s also easy to build out a napkin-drawing or sketched BOM with PartsList. Just load the basic information—part number and manufacturer—into PartsList, select Autofill and PartsList will pull the rest of the information you need to complete your BOM.

If you have a BOM in EDA or ECAD, or a reference design from a partner or manufacturer, you can import the old design to PartsList, remove the components that you want to replace, and use PartSaver to clip replacement parts.

Create a new part request form

PartsList gives you a full list with supplier item information, which can be passed to document control for creation of internal part numbers and inclusion of parts into another system—if you have access to PLM, or an ECAD library.

It’s never too early to be organized

If you’re an engineer at an early-stage startup, two guys in a garage building a prototype or even a serial inventor with a ton of ideas to document, a comprehensive cloud PLM solution might feel like a bit much. But if you want to be prepared when it’s time to scale, it’s never too early to adopt a simple, effective way to collect part data, as well as build and share simple BOMs. So I hope you give PartsList a try.

For more information:

Try Arena PartsList for free today

Your right-sized BOM management toolkit in the cloud

Arena PDXViewer-display PDX build packages in an easy-to-read, navigable format

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is confident that this will soon be a reality.

The website just announced it is supporting a new type of file on its BitTorrent site—“physibles.” TPB uses this term to describe “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Among the current TPB physible files available for download on the site are a Chevelle hot-rod 3D model and a clock.

TPB is the 75th most visited website in the world and has more than 5 million registered users. So for many in the tech world, the website’s actions carry weight and may indicate trends to come.

What 3D downloading would mean for the world of commerce

The Pirate Bay has declared that 3D downloading comes with some benefits for society. In fact, TPB shared on its company blog that “we [TPB] believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”

But the implications of this technology go far beyond new sneakers. TPB predicts, “no more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labor. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.”

If TPB is right, and consumers can just print products from the comfort of their own home, what will happen to the establishments of the manufacturing industry—like factories and plants?

Sound like a bunch of sci-fi nonsense?

A world without factories and assembly lines seems unfathomable. And, to be honest, you probably don’t need to worry about the factory near you closing its doors anytime soon. 3D printing may never replace the need for manufacturers, and printing and assembling your own goods may be a long time away from mainstream acceptance. And the fact the TPB has a controversial reputation for its loose IP protection policy and anti-copyright stance may further skepticism about the new technology.

But it’s worth noting that the technology needed to download and print 3D files already exists. The MakerScanner, for example, is an open source 3D scanner that digitally records 3D objects and sends the information for print using a MakerBot 3D printer. RepRap is another open source ‘self-replicating’ 3D printer capable of producing plastic objects. You can watch a video of how the RepRap works here.

Time will tell what the future holds for 3D downloading

As with the introduction of any major new technology, there are a lot of questions still unanswered, and we are just entering the infant stages of 3D downloading technologies.

Nonetheless, TPB seems confident in declaring, “the future of sharing is about physible data.”

If 3D downloading really is on the horizon, what do you think the short term and long term ramifications might be?

UPDATE (2/6): A team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has successfully replaced an 83 year old woman’s jaw with a 3D printed model of a prosthetic jaw. Read more here.

For more information:

Adopting innovation as a winning philosophy: an Arena customer spotlight

What’s next in manufacturing? Some predictions for 2012

Can you teach a robot to flip a pancake?

Our customer, Liquid Robotics, has been all over the news lately with their Wave Glider, an autonomous ocean-powered robot that can travel long distances, hold station and measure everything happening in the ocean—from weather to whale activity to oil slicks.

In November, we announced that Liquid Robotics was hosting the PacX Challenge—a data-collection journey across the Pacific Ocean that will break the world record for longest distance ever attempted by an unmanned ocean vehicle. I was lucky enough to attend the launch on Nov 17 at the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco where I had a chance to get up close and personal with the four bots attempting the journey.

During their 300 day voyage across the ocean, four Wave Gliders will collect approximately 2.25 million discrete data points that will give scientists insight into ocean salinity, water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence and dissolved oxygen. Two robots will go from San Francisco to Australia, and two will go from San Francisco to Japan (after a pit stop in Hawaii in February.)

So far, the mission has been going pretty well. After a brief shakedown in the San Francisco Bay, the robots were on their way, and have already collected a ton of interesting data points for scientists and researchers to review.

The Wave Gliders prepare for their journey across the Pacific ocean.

With the press gathered around, the Wave Gliders are ready to launch!

James Gosling, creator of Java, and chief software architect at Liquid Robotics, photographs the Wave Gliders as they leave the Bay.

Meet the Ocean-crossing Robots

TEAM JAPAN—Piccard Maru & Fontaine Maru

Piccard Maru
Inspired by Jacques Piccard, a Swiss oceanographer and engineer, known for having developed underwater vehicles for studying ocean currents. He was one of only two people, along with Lt. Don Walsh of the United States Navy, to have explored the deepest part of the world’s ocean, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth’s crust, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench located in the western North Pacific Ocean.

Fontaine Maru
Inspired by Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American astronomer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, and educator. Maury made many important new contributions to charting winds and ocean currents, including ocean lanes for passing ships at sea.

TEAM AUSTRALIA—Benjamin & Papa Mau

Benjamin
Inspired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. In addition to his writings, his inventions and experiments with electricity, Ben was an early oceanographer. As deputy postmaster, Franklin became interested in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns. Ultimately, Franklin was responsible for discovering the Gulf Stream Current.

Papa Mau
Inspired by Pius “Mau” Piailug, a Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal. Mau was best known as a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wayfinding methods for deep-sea voyaging. With Mau’s help, the Polynesian Voyaging Society PVS was able to recreate and test lost Hawaiian navigational techniques on the Hōkūle‘a, a modern reconstruction of a double-hulled Hawaiian voyaging canoe.

How is data being captured along the way?

Here are some of the sensors mounted on the Wave Gliders as they make their way across the Pacific.

You can follow along and see the robots' progress on Google Earth, via the Liquid Robotics website

Seabird GPCTD with Dissolved Oxygen Sensor – measures water conductivity, temperature, depth, and dissolved oxygen just below the float of the Wave Glider.

Datawell MOSE-G Directional Wave Sensor – measures significant wave height, average period, peak period, and peak direction.

Airmar PB200 WeatherStation– measures air temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind gust speed, and wind direction one meter above the deck of the Wave Glider.

Turner Designs C3 Submersible Fluorometer – measures chlorophyll-A and crude oil fluorescence, as well as turbidity and water temperature just below the float of the Wave Glider.

For more information:

Our customers are doing some pretty big things, and it’s always a pleasure to be involved! If you’re interested in following the PacX journey, keep up with the robots on the Liquid Robotics blog. To read more articles on manufacturing and engineering innovation, subscribe to our blog.

It was a busy year, yet there’s one trend in particular that grabbed my attention—the rise of smart packaging.

Puma's 'clever little bag' uses 65% less cardboard than a typical shoebox.

Today, discarded or once-used packaging makes up about a third of our landfills. This isn’t just bad news for our environment, it represents money down the drain for manufacturers as well. To combat this wastefulness, many manufacturers are using the philosophy of smart packaging to reduce the amount of resources used to ship goods and package products.

One of my favorite smart packaging designs this year came from Puma, who designed a clever little bag that uses 65% less cardboard than a typical cardboard shoebox. The design also reduces the typical water, energy and diesel consumption that goes into making a shoebox—saving 8,500 tons of paper, 20 million megajoules of electricity and 1 million liters of water. Not to mention, the box looks cool and is a huge hit with customers.

Perhaps because of the bag’s commercial success, some have wondered if the design is just a marketing tactic, or an actual investment in green packaging.

After hearing the doubts, Puma tweeted in response:

Well played, Puma.

Outdoor gear shop REI also embraces smart packaging

Eric Abraham, packaging engineering manager for REI, recently announced a “no packaging, simply product” philosophy for five of the company’s most popular products. The move is part of the company’s new goal to reduce packing materials by 35% by 2013.

Below is an example of REI’s “no packaging, simply product” philosophy in action.

The large, brown package in the back is REI’s old packaging method. It uses polylaminate to adhere the trekking pole tips to a recycled paper backing card. The new packaging is the smaller item in front. It’s the same product, but the new package uses 100% post-consumer recycled paper and a clay-coated newsback. The means a 36% lower packaging weight and no plastic waste.

For REI, green packaging has saved  millions of dollars a year, as well as improved customer engagement. Nothing builds loyalty like taking a stand for a common goal—in this case, a greener planet.

REI’s decision to move to more sustainable packaging wasn’t inspired by expensive surveys and case studies on consumer behavior—it came from simply observing shoppers. When REI started offering in-store recycling for the shipping boxes used to deliver boots, many customers discarded their box in the recycling bin immediately after buying the shoes. After all, people were buying the boots, not the box.

Does your product packaging need an IQ adjustment?

You might need to spend some creative energy and logistical brainpower to figure out how to implement smarter packaging for your product, but there are big payoffs for making the effort. Not only will you reduce packaging costs and eliminate excess waste, but you might also experience a surge in interest and customer loyalty.

Does your current packaging align with the values of your customers and your business?

For more information:

Lytro makes headlines with its light field photography camera

Adopting innovation as a winning philosophy: An Arena Customer Spotlight

Can sustainability help mitigate supply chain risk?

Lessons from Apple—what can small manufacturers learn from Apple’s success?

Through my exposure to Arena’s customer base, which includes innovative manufacturing companies like GoPro, Square, Beats by Dr. Dre and Sonos, I’ve come across a variety of inspired new products that are not only taking design and engineering to the next level but are also changing the way we live.

Below are a few of the pioneering new products that have caught my eye this year, and just may inspire you to beef up your holiday wish list.

The Fitbit Ultra—a wireless activity and sleep tracker to improve fitness

The Fitbit Ultra tracks your steps taken, stairs climbed and calories burned.

Fitbit, an Arena customer, recently released its Ultra Wireless Tracker that provides even more incentive to take the stairs. The Ultra tracks every step you take using a super sensitive 3-D motion sensor called a MEMS 3-axis accelerometer, similar to the sensor built into a Wii controller, and provides more accuracy than traditional pedometers. The newly built-in altimeter recognizes when you are climbing or descending stairs and counts that in your daily exercise as well.

The Ultra can also calculate calories burned throughout the course of the day, giving you a complete snapshot of your daily fitness. You can even track how long and how well you sleep and automatically sync your data into the cloud to check progress over time.

Withings’s Wi-Fi Body Scale—the first personalized smart scale

Monitor your weight, fat mass and BMI with the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale

Being a numbers junkie, the wi-fi body scale appeals to my addiction. This beautifully designed scale gives you a complete body analysis, including stats on weight, fat and muscle mass and BMI, and tracks changes over time. The silver wi-fi sensor in the center of the scale automatically sends your health stats to the cloud, where you can access the data online or through a free app on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. The web dashboard clearly displays your health information over a period of time and allows you to view any given date range. And since the data exists in the cloud, it’s easy to share your health progress with others, like your doctor or coach.

The scale is extremely accurate and can automatically recognize and remember multiple users, making it family-friendly.

RunKeeper—designed to track, manage and improve your fitness

Who says running isn’t social? Besides tracking running stats including distance, pace, calories, heart rate and paths traveled, RunKeeper creates a social community around improving your daily exercise.

Track your progress with the RunKeeper mobile app

RunKeeper is a mobile app that uses the GPS already built into most mobile devices to log your fitness runs and patterns and lets you share that information with those in your fitness community. By sharing your workouts with friends and family, you get the social motivation and feedback to push yourself to the next level.

The app is smart enough to identify patterns in your workout to help you improve the performance and quality of your workouts. Just sync up your iPod and off you go.

Strava—helping you log, analyze, compare and compete with your rides

Strava is another social fitness tracking mobile app that gives you a detailed snapshot of your fitness routine and enables easy comparison with friends around the world. You can also choose to maintain your privacy and use it for personal tracking.

Visualize your rides with Strava's training log

Using a dedicated GPS device or one already built into your iPhone or Android, Strava tracks and analyzes your rides or runs and visualizes your fitness history over time. Strava even takes elevation into account, adjusting your “suffer score” based on your increased heart rate during a given sprint.

One of the coolest aspects of Strava is its Leaderboard feature, which let’s you compare your pace on a given route with previous runs or with friends who have run the same ground. You can even filter through Strava users who belong to a similar weight and age class to see how you fare.

Which innovative new gadgets have grabbed your attention this holiday season? Share your find in the comments section below.

For more information:

Lytro makes headlines with its light field photography camera

The Victor Bike: the bicycle goes even greener

Does open-design hardware have a place in manufacturing?

Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. And back in the day, a well-built HeathKit radio was every bit as good as the store-bought ones.

HeathKit fell by the wayside as the complexity for products increased and the quality difference between what you could buy commercially and what you could build yourself became too large, but thanks to the popularity of publications like Make Magazine, and an increase in the availability of specialty electronic parts and open-source software, a Maker renaissance has begun.

And when the Maker mentality pairs up with recent developments in hardware—like the success of Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform—I have to wonder if conditions are right for a Maker-minded, open-design hardware community to stake a claim in the consumer manufacturing landscape.

Software has laid the philosophical foundation for open-source design

The success of Linux and other open-source tools have demonstrated that certain classes of software deliver greater functionality and value through a collaborative, open development process. Not only has it been proven that these open-source software platforms can add value, but there are even examples, like Red Hat, Linux and Springsource, of profitable businesses who only publish open-source software. These companies give the product away for free, and make money by providing support, services, integration and community for that software.

The growing acceptance of open-source software products presents an interesting question for hardware manufacturers—could a growing hardware Maker community create similar value in open-design hardware? Is there a class of products for which the open-design model is better than the proprietary development model?

Open-design hardware dominates in some unusual places

At first glance, it would appear that Arduino stands alone as a model for open-source hardware design, but there are other markets where mass-produced, open-design hardware has succeeded, and even dominated. For instance, the M1911 pistol—the classic “Colt 45”—has been produced world-wide using an open design for decades. Similarly, the AK-47 submachine gun was designed in Russia, but is now produced world-wide from readily available specifications.

The success of the open-design model in the gun market is informative. For better or worse, guns are in wide demand all over the world, and if you looked at other markets where there is global demand for a high-value product—like high-tech electronics—you might expect the gun market to be dominated by a few global suppliers of proprietary products who achieve tremendous economies of scale (think of Apple, or IBM, or Cisco in electronics). Two characteristics make the gun market special: an overriding need for standardization, and support for local manufacturers who are too small to develop proprietary designs. Standardization is required because guns have to be compatible with a standardized component—ammunition—and because armies want to minimize their training costs. And nation-states have a very strong interest in supporting a “local” gun industry because they generally don’t want to rely on others for their guns.

Other than guns, there are examples of successful open designs in the form of standards-based products in some commodity functions—like plumbing—where there is relatively little opportunity for innovation, and where the market demands a standardized device that just works in existing infrastructure. When a market relies on mechanical interchangeability of simple hardware in a very large installed base, the benefits of open-design outweigh the benefits of proprietary solutions.

Will open-design supplant proprietary design in new markets?

The fact that open-design hardware has dominated specific, niche markets, is proof that it can work commercially—it’s just a question of the market fit.

For example, the open-design approach may not ever be appropriate for brand name, mass-produced, electronic consumer products. In this case, the economies of scale and required level of design integration are probably not achievable by an open-design community with limited resources.

However, if we got to a point where high-quality open designs could be easily fabricated and produced by many manufacturers, this could be a successful model in markets where product utility is more important than style, and where economies of scale are not too great. For example, there have been successful open-design products in the developing world for products such as water pumps and systems for water purification. There is an opportunity to cultivate an entrepreneurial manufacturing community in the developing world through the production of these kinds of open-design products.

Another place where this model might work is being demonstrated by sites like Kickstarter, where some companies have successfully paid for product development and manufacturing through pre-committed orders. To place a pre-committed order, a customer has to believe that the delivered product will really work. The transparency of a community-backed open design could provide the “product credibility” needed to enable manufacturers to use the pre-committed revenue model more broadly.

For example, if you had a machine shop, you could publish a catalog of community-created open designs, and allow pre-paid demand to drive your production schedule. This would be a great way to get interesting, innovative products to the customer as needed.

Because really, who wouldn’t want one of these?

To read more musings from Eric Larkin

Minimum viable product

Do QR codes belong on the shop floor?

Internet explorer, standards and customer value

I love a good opportunity to brag about Arena customers, and so I’d like to thank Lytro for giving me something to talk about.

Last week, Lytro launched an ultra-compact light field photography camera that allows users to take pictures without having to focus the lens. (Or as TechCrunch reported, Lytro launched “a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s.”)

What is a light field camera, and why is it so cool?

The innovation in the Lytro camera comes from its ability to capture the light field—or the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space.

Capturing the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light requires a totally new type of sensor, and it’s something conventional cameras have not been able to do.

Once you capture the light field, you can do a lot of post-production work that was impossible before. You can focus anywhere in the image, and refocus your pictures at anytime after the fact.

The new technology in the Lytro camera may also lead to better overall camera performance. For example, because an auto-focus motor is no longer needed, shutter delay becomes a thing of the past.

The Lytro cameras create the first “living pictures” as they can be refocused over and over again by different users. The technology is still very new, but we see a lot of exciting potential for them as they fine-tune their product, get user feedback, and continue to develop. (Check out the Lytro picture gallery to see it in action.)

It’s companies like Lytro that make me proud of my work at Arena, so I’d like to say “Congratulations” again to the Lytro team—I am excited to see what they come up with next.

For more information, check out the Lytro blog. But first, check out this video!

In spite of being the first-to-market with an innovative product, the company fell into bankruptcy five years after launch. In 2010, the company re-launched as IRX Innovations—this time with a new focus on highly specialized business and enterprise markets rather than consumer markets.

IRX knows that sometimes it takes more than innovation and hard work to successfully launch a company—sometimes, timing is everything. We spoke with Daniel Wiermans, senior electrical engineer at IRX Innovations, to learn more about the risks that come with innovating in a new field.

Interview with IRX Innovations—a leader in e-reader device technology

Alyssa: Has IRX Innovations benefited from embracing innovation?

Daniel: Ultimately, our ability to innovate and adapt has helped us, but not without some bumps along the way. We’ve learned that while innovation can be very important for company success, it is possible to be too innovative, too early.

We developed our e-reader before the market existed—before the publishing world had embraced electronic books. In fact, our device was so new to the United States market that TSA airport security wasn’t sure what to make of our device the first time they encountered it.

We released our first e-reader in 2006, with amazingly advanced features, but it was very difficult to sell the device without the available technology to get PDF books onto the device. Publishers were hesitant to take a risk on electronic books due to piracy concerns, and we had a hard time convincing them that electronic books were the future. We told them this was an opportunity to pioneer the e-reader field, but it was very difficult to find support.

Alyssa: What did you learn from breaking into a highly competitive and foreign emerging market?

Daniel: Companies looking to break into an emerging market, and small companies in particular, have to be ready at a moment’s notice to adapt to swift market changes. Emerging markets are highly unpredictable and the decision to enter often comes down to the question of when and how. Timing is everything.

When iRex introduced its first e-reader, our 3G technology inside e-books was still considered uncharted territory. The FCC had not yet determined an acceptable level of radiation from 3G modems inside e-books, which meant our wireless enabled e-readers sat on the warehouse shelves, unsellable. We lost a lot of money waiting for the green light from the government. The capital exposure that resulted proved too much for our small company and we did not survive the transition.

Alyssa: How did company size impact your ability to compete in the new market? 

Daniel: Larger companies are at an advantage in emerging markets because they can afford to create and influence the market themselves, which lends a much greater sense of control over uncertainties. Smaller companies simply do not have the same resources to bounce back from a major hit.

Once our devices made it to the shelves in the United States, we immediately felt price pressure from larger companies who could afford to sell their products at artificially low prices. Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who produced and Kindle and Nook e-reader devices, respectively, were able to subsidize device hardware costs with e-book sales.

The specialized technology in our devices also drove up our prices. We provided the fastest screen refresh capabilities, the highest storage capacity and the best quality touch screen of any device on the market—but that doesn’t come cheap.

At the end of the day, the price sensitivity of the consumer market drove competition to a level where we could not compete.

Alyssa: When you re-launched as IRX Innovations, how did your company protect itself from falling into the same pitfall?

Daniel: As a smaller company, we took advantage of the ability to go back to the drawing board. We went back to basics and developed a two-pillar approach to match our core business values and expertise.

Firstly, we realized that our strength was our technical expertise in e-ink and e-paper devices, which meant we were not going to sacrifice quality to lower cost. Secondly, we stopped producing devices for price-sensitive consumer markets and turned our focus to relatively price-insensitive markets with highly specified device requirements—such as the military and aviation fields.

By rethinking our strategy based on our product specs and expertise, we have found a niche that works for us.

Alyssa: What unique approaches have helped IRX achieve success?

Daniel: IRX has survived several rounds of setbacks in a highly competitive market because of our flexibility as a company. With fewer than 25 employees, we can respond and adapt well to market changes. We also run all our operations in-house, including engineering and logistics. This allows us to oversee our day-to-day processes and respond better to customer needs.

For more information:

To learn more about IRX Innovations, you can visit the company website and read more on the company’s electronic paper display technologies.  If you would like to be featured in an upcoming customer spotlight, post to our comments section below and I’ll be in touch.

Adopting innovation as a winning philosophy: An Arena Customer Spotlight

The advantages, challenges and risks of manufacturing outsourcing

Interview with Mobius Photonics—an innovative scientific and industrial laser producer

The first customer we’d like to highlight is Mobius Photonics—a short-pulse, fiber-based laser company based in Mountain View, CA. Mobius is a small company, with fewer than 20 employees, yet it’s been able to scale by strategically using its resources. Since its launch in 2005, Mobius has survived a recession, a period of rapid growth and a direct hit on its following the Japanese tsunami.

Earlier this year, Mobius developed a new prototype laser source named “Rainbow.”  Rainbow’s unique design employs a novel way of using optical fiber to generate key visible wavelengths for super-resolution microscopy applications. The system is intended to allow scientists to image biological samples quickly, using florescent markers of choice.  To see how the company is navigating this exciting time, and to discuss how an open-minded and innovative culture has contributed to the company’s success, we talked with Red Byer, co-founder and vice president of operations at Mobius Photonics. Below is a summary of our conversation.

Alyssa: How has Mobius benefited from embracing innovation?

Red: At Mobius, we believe innovation transcends the product design process and extends to all levels of company operations. Any way a company can cut costs and save time, while maintaining quality standards,  is a good thing, so we are very receptive to new ideas from anyone in the organization. As a small company, we can react and respond quickly to innovative ideas and tend to have a hands-on approach to innovation.

I think it’s important to remember that even trivial, everyday innovations can make a big difference in your daily operations as well as your bottom line. For example, a while back we needed a new safety barrier for our high power laser. A typical laser safety barrier can cost as much as $5000 and require contractor installation in a fixed location, so we decided to leverage our in-house engineers to design and build it ourselves. We expended a small amount of time and energy upfront, and came out with a completed design that is safer, cleanroom compliant, highly modular and costs us a mere $300 in materials while taking one person less than 30 minutes to assemble.

Alyssa: What challenges Mobius?         

 Red: Maintaining consistency of process—particularly when it comes to receiving parts and handling accounts and transactions—is a continual challenge. We are a small company with a very complex product and BOM, so we’re always asking ourselves whether we are using our product management tools, like Arena, in the most efficient way.

Day-to-day communication with our suppliers around the world is another challenge. We try to keep our suppliers in the fold of our operations as much as possible, but it’s surprising how often a supplier can forget a log-in, which can clog up process.

Alyssa: How have changing market conditions like the recession, increased global competition or natural disasters affected Mobius and its customer base?

Red: The recent tsunami in Japan definitely impacted the semiconductor industry—our primary customer base. This could have been disastrous for us, but fortunately we were at the tail-end of a product design phase and had not yet ramped manufacturing. The poor market conditions gave us a small window of opportunity to prove out and gather data on the quality and cost effectiveness of our product. If we had already ramped and been mid-production when the tsunami hit, we would surely have experienced a very different set of issues.

Alyssa: What unique approaches have helped Mobius achieve success?

Red: We are unusual in our industry in that we’ve merged the design and manufacturing engineering functions and have implemented a cradle-to-grave approach for our engineers. We adopted this philosophy because we believe that when these groups are totally separate, successful hand offs are rare. When engineers follow their designs all the way and are engaged in the manufacturing process, there are fewer errors and less opportunities for miscommunication— and this ultimately creates better synergy between design and production.

Alyssa: If Mobius had a superpower, what would it be?

Red: I’d say that Mobius’ superpower would be the ability to peer into the future and support decisions and investments with big picture in mind. Even if something seems like a big up-front investment, or takes a lot of work initially, we look down the road to determine if it will pay off. If we think it makes sense, we’ll put in the work to get it done right from the start. And so far, this approach has worked really well for us.

For example, we owe the ease with which we scaled to our early implementation of a PLM and ERP system. When we first began Mobius, we had a PLM system (Arena), Quick Books and Excel. We were doing a lot of double-entering between Quickbooks and Excel and dealing with all sorts of accounting mismatches—and we quickly realized we needed to start thinking about growth and staying competitive. It’s tough to do this without implementing a PLM and ERP system up front.

Another time we used foresight to our advantage was when we decided to implement a modular design strategy. This design style is still largely unheard of in our industry and comes with some cost, but now we can tinker with one or two components and come out with a new design at a much faster rate. This creates a long term design and engineering savings. Because we invested in the infrastructure in advance, the aggressive goal of developing several new products in 2011 is realistically achievable. The leverage this has given us is huge—we can now develop a new laser design in a matter of months rather than years, which means we have more time and energy to devote to innovation and product optimization.

For more information

To learn more about Mobius Photonics, you can visit the company website or check out the Mobius news section to read more on the prototype Rainbow Laser and other Mobius innovations.  If you would like to be featured in an upcoming customer spotlight, post to our comments section below and I’ll be in touch.

Meet Mobius Photonics. Founded in 2005, Mobius has fewer than 20 employees. Mobius has been developing fiber-based laser technologies for years, and in early 2011, the company developed a new prototype laser system for the scientific research field—the “Rainbow” Laser System. Rainbow’s unique design employs a novel way of using optical fiber to generate key visible wavelengths for super-resolution microscopy applications. Mobius developed its prototype Rainbow system to help scientific researchers image biological samples quickly, with ultra-high resolution and using florescent markers of choice.

The Rainbow Laser System is a huge accomplishment for such a small company. Mobius’ ability to develop new technologies with limited resources and manpower is a testament to its distinctive company culture and strategy, and other would-be innovators can learn a lot from the way Mobius has maximized collaboration, innovation and foresight to overcome the usual obstacles and develop a pioneering prototype in addition to its other products.

Eliminating the engineering ‘he-said, she-said’

Orchestrating a successful engineering-to-manufacturing hand-off can be a challenge at even the highest functioning organizations. For Mobius, the best way to deal with the engineering hand-off was to eliminate it altogether. For example, instead of passing the company’s G1R3 laser system for materials processing applications from engineering to manufacturing, engineers followed the design all the way through the development process—and this kept them engaged in both the design and production of the product. Having a tightly integrated team has saved Mobius both time and money and minimized miscommunication throughout the production process.

Innovation as a daily routine

For small businesses, resources are often limited.  And when saving money is a top priority, developing innovative solutions to expensive problems can improve the bottom line when funds are tight.

For Mobius, this means leveraging in-house talent to creatively solve problems. When the company needed to purchase a laser safety barrier but the cost seemed too high, Mobius decided to utilize in-house engineers to design a safer and more flexible barrier system at a fraction of the cost.

Keeping an open mind to innovative ideas is not just a good management practice, it will also help a small business stay competitive and boost company morale.

When planning for today, think about tomorrow

Excel might be cheap, but it could not sustain our growing business forever…

Red Byer
VP of Operations
Mobius Photonics

Maintaining a competitive edge today and planning for future growth are not mutually exclusive. The market is moving faster than ever before and small operations must keep one eye on current performance while scanning the horizon with the other.

Mobius is a big-picture kind of company, and when looking at its future growth projections, leadership decided to integrate ERP and PLM systems early in the production process. Originally, Mobius relied on QuickBooks to manage its basic accounting needs, but soon realized it simply would not scale to meet the company’s needs. The system was beginning to threaten growth—a definite concern.

“Excel might be cheap, but it couldn’t sustain our growing business forever, so we made the investment to implement Arena PLM from the start” explained Red Byer, co-founder and vice president of operations at Mobius Photonics.  “As for ERP, we could have waited until we were bigger and our back was against the wall, but at that point it becomes a huge headache—not to mention a waste of time and money—to migrate to a new business, accounting and product lifecycle management system.”

Future-minded actions like the early implementation of scaling tools can make all the difference in how small organizations grow, and while businesses can plan for today’s needs, tomorrow’s needs should be taken into account as well.

Do you have tips for success you’d like to share?

It’s too easy to forget that innovation and hard work were not always enough to turn world changing ideas into reality. At Arena, we celebrate innovators and entrepreneurs, and love sharing the success stories of up-and-coming small businesses. If you have a story you’d like to share, post to the comments below, and you could be featured on our Arena blog!

More information:

Why is it so hard to move a BOM from engineering to manufacturing?

Three ideas for encouraging workplace innovation