Archives for "Product Snafus"
Names have been changed…another story from the front lines of manufacturing
If you’re reading this blog, you most likely know the vital importance—and enormous challenge—of good revision control when designing and manufacturing products. Lost in the Woods: The three things you should do to prevent revision control failures is the second installment of the Product Disaster Series and can be found in the Arena Dispatches, where we change names to protect the innocent and retell the classic “…and then something went very, very wrong” stories of our collective past.
Lost in the Woods is an “if only…” story of a company that’s forced to scrap the big roll-out of an extremely promising product redesign when a critical component of the product can’t be sourced in time. Stunned by the loss of so many expected sales and accolades, the company is painfully reminded that true revision control takes more than a spreadsheet bill of materials (BOM) on a server and verbal engineering change notifications (ECNs)—and that even a single discrepancy in the version of the BOM that’s sent to a contract manufacturer (CM) can be disastrous.
Once again, it’s a quick, easy read and a good reminder of why all your hard work to ensure good revision control is worth the effort!
Names have been changed to protect the innocent — stories from the front lines of manufacturing
Every product company has a story–one that makes you cringe just thinking about it–where something went wrong…really, really wrong. A situation that could have been avoided if only….
At Arena we hear these stories all the time. They wrench our gut and remind us of the days when we worked in manufacturing.
We’ve taken these stories, yours and ours, changed the names, products and companies to protect the innocent, and retold them. The first one is posted in the new Arena Dispatches section of our website. It’s called Up in Smoke: The 3 things you need to know about managing product change.
Up in Smoke tells the story of a toy manufacturer trying to understand how its blockbuster franchise could literally go down in flames at the height of its popularity. It’s a cautionary tale about the perils of relying on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage bills of materials (BOMs), engineering change orders (ECOs) and the new product development (NPD) process.
Though it may bring back a painful memory or two, it’s also a quick, easy read, so check it out!
Best & worst gadgets of the decade (or, when a good idea just isn’t enough)
As we start the Arena blog, something else is ending—the decade. And that means best of (and worst of) lists are popping up everywhere. One of the lists that caught my eye is Laptop Magazine’s Best & Worst Gadgets of the Decade.
I’m sure most of you can name the big winners—like the iPod or the USB drive— but there are lessons to be learned from the losers. While 2002’s “wearable PC” was probably destined for failure from the outset, gadgets like the Garmin GPS phone sounded like a great idea, but were hurt by slow development. Announced in January 2008 and not released until late 2009, by the time the device was ready, it was already obsolete. “Garmin’s competitors in the GPS space, such as Navigon and TomTom, released apps that nimbly worked with the iPhone.” And the Garmin GPS phone was doomed.
The lesson? In the high-tech industry, change occurs rapidly, so product development has to be as streamlined as possible.
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