Time to market is a critical consideration
Being first is key, unless you can be substantially better. Being third means being out of luck.
By Kim Rowe
Embedded.com (02/27/10, 08:42:00 PM EST)
Ever wonder why deadlines in embedded projects are so important? When good project managers sweat over every detail to make sure the project doesn't slip, do you wonder why it was perceived as so important? After all, from the perspective of the engineering lab, a few days of slippage on a task will slip the project by only a few days—and there is always another show to launch the product.
Getting your OEM product to market in the right time frame is one of two critical factors in the success of your product after development kickoff. The second critical factor is product quality. If your organization is obsessed with meeting these self-imposed deadlines for product launch and maintaining quality, it's likely because you work in a great products company.
The reason that time to market is so important is because being late erodes the addressable market that you have to sell your product into. If you initially target a market segment of ten million units, with a market lifetime of 18 months, and you are six months late, the addressable market will likely be in the range of three million units. Not only will the market be smaller, the competition will be much more intense because others have an established base to sell from and the early growth is starting to flatten.
What happens when the addressable market shrinks? Your smaller market means that your volume of sales goes down in direct proportion to the loss of market size. The decrease in volume of sales is critical to your company's business model. Now you have lost economies of scale in manufacturing and purchasing, and will suffer loss of experience effect relative to your competitors. This will directly affect the company's profitability and if you do this too often, being late will directly affect your job and those of your colleagues.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Flexible Pixel Processor Video IP
- Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 Digital IP
- MIPI SWI3S Manager Core IP
- Ultra-low power high dynamic range image sensor
- Neural Video Processor IP
Related White Papers
- Reduce Time to Market for FPGA-Based Communication and Datacenter Applications
- Paving the way for the next generation of audio codec for True Wireless Stereo (TWS) applications - PART 5 : Cutting time to market in a safe and timely manner
- Opinion: Grappling with licensing and time to market issues
- FPGAs accelerate time to market for industrial designs
Latest White Papers
- Enabling Space-Grade AI/ML with RISC-V: A Fully European Stack for Autonomous Missions
- CANDoSA: A Hardware Performance Counter-Based Intrusion Detection System for DoS Attacks on Automotive CAN bus
- How Next-Gen Chips Are Unlocking RISC-V’s Customization Advantage
- Efficient Hardware-Assisted Heap Memory Safety for Embedded RISC-V Systems
- Automatically Retargeting Hardware and Code Generation for RISC-V Custom Instructions