The smart fridge is already well-known. Nowadays there are already fridges which propose possible dishes based on their contents – and in addition provide the right recipe for cooking them. Or a lawn-mower that knows your garden and cuts the grass – avoiding the flowers which are recognized automatically and that take into consideration the weather to cut the grass at the right timing. With Smart Products Engineering many of these ideas can be realized already today.
Today’s customers do not put their decision on buying a specific new product purely on the functionality but also on criteria like usability and ease of use (nobody wants to read or even study hundreds of pages in a manual). The products need to be modern and “intuitive”, at best the product should think along the same line, and even anticipate what I intend to do next. In short the user expects products and devices to be intelligent – smart.
From Consumer to Business
For the manufacturers it is a challenge and an opportunity to find this extra value in their products; smartness is “in”. Especially in the hi-tech and electronics industry customers don’t want to buy techniques or GHz and bytes but they also look for the user-experience that fulfills their emotions – easy and intuitive, switching on and using the product, without reading any manual at all.
However, this applies not only for the consumer industry. Similarly, this applies also for most of the industry like the medical industry and its devices. Think about “smart ambulance” that transfer critical vital data for the next therapy steps already during the drive to the hospital. Or looking to “homecare” situations: Wouldn’t it be a nice improvement if grandma or grandpa could stay at home when turning older because they have a smart blood sugar device or a smart heart beat device with them informing their relatives about an unexpected situation automatically?
Smart is in…
As mentioned before, we use smart products already in many everyday situations. Nobody buys a TV with a tube anymore. Such a device wouldn’t allow us to surf the internet or phone with Skype…
…but it mustn’t be more expensive
Thus, the manufacturers of products – no matter if consumer or industrial products – need to fulfil these trends and challenges. In addition to the move towards higher user-experience and smartness the cost pressure increases continuously. Products need to be cheaper and cheaper, lifecycle efforts and costs need to decrease and on the other side time to market needs to be shortened.
But how to add the required “smartness” to your own products? How to get this done efficiently and cheaply? What new competences are needed (e.g. for embedded hard- and software design and development, requirement engineering, usability design…) How to take care about the lifecycle processes efficiently?
Better to have an engineering partner who talks about Smart Products Engineering.
Discuss with us!
