Tag Archives: Outsource Partner

How Do You Communicate Your Solution to Potential Clients? Eight Recommendations

Interview with Eric Bauswell, President, SurfaceInk

Situation: For a domestic engineering solutions company, one of the challenges is engaging potential customers with the idea that a domestic solution can cost-effectively meet their needs. If you can combine a manufacturing solution to the service solution, this helps. What have you done to effectively communicate your solution to potential clients?

Advice:

  • Know your clients. Clients have expertise of their own. However, they may lack expertise in all the disciplines necessary to create a full product. How will you fill the gap?
  • Know your strengths.
    • Design is an iterative development process. If you increase process efficiency you can complete more process cycles in a given timeframe, advancing to final product more quickly.
    • Identify your key differentiators. Target clients for whom your differentiator is a critical need. For example, we do not encourage all of our clients to manufacture overseas, but if they insist and lack experience managing overseas vendors, we can handle this for them.
    • Consistency of personnel across the life of a project is important, particularly the core team.
    • “Invention & Innovation” require a plan to mitigate the risk they represent.  Develop the design along parallel paths, stage higher risk components or pieces of the design that represent critical path inventions such that they are proven prior to moving forward, or even take that feature out of the current design in order to develop it to a production ready solution for the next product on the client roadmap.  Sometimes an invention or innovation is THE reason for the new product.  In these cases the key is managing the client’s expectations regarding the significantly elevated risks that come with invention and proceeding with the understanding that the phase gates and even the production dates will slide according to the progress against developing that critical path invention or innovation.
    • Expertise in material selection and understanding what can be done with materials in the manufacturing process is non-trivial, as is vendor qualification, particularly with new materials.
  • Know your competitors. How do they handle similar challenges to those that you face?
  • Know your vendors. “Right-sizing” your contract manufacturer to your client’s product is important. Things will go wrong, and you must assure that the contract manufacturer will give you the priority to get things back on track to meet your launch date.

You can contact Eric Bauswell at [email protected]

Key Words: Engineering Services, Domestic, Outsource Partner, Strengths, Differentiators, Materials, Prototype, Parallel Path, Vendor Selection

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What to Look for in a Remote Infrastructure Management Service?

Interview with G.K. Chitta, CEO, INSTA Intelligence Technologies

Situation: Fast growing companies often find it difficult to scale internal IT management to keep pace with database growth. There are typically 1-3 people in charge of dB management in a small to medium-sized business. Crisis hits when there is an abrupt system shutdown for up to 48 hours and a significant disruption to company operations. How can this be avoided?

Advice:

  • The difficulty is that small infrastructure teams often don’t have the range of skills to diagnose dB issues. Calling Oracle, SAP, etc. for assistance gets expensive fast.
  • One option is to outsource business intelligence and dB management to a specialist. Quality offshore resources exist that can take over support of company BI and dB management, offering a full suite of services from anti-virus to preventative diagnosis of subtle misalignments.
  • For example, INSTA replicates the dB in a remote data center so that they can monitor the system for errors, develop solutions, and remotely resolves errors with no interruption to users.
  • In addition, some outsourced specialists include calls to Oracle, SAP and so forth as necessary to resolve problems at no cost to the client.
  • In a recent pilot study in a company with 5 servers, the offshore outsource partner provided a full suite of services and was able to increase uptime from 95-97% on a daily basis to 99.97%. This level of performance should be the goal.
  • Your outsource provider should have 24/7/365 support services, and
  • Should provide you with a service-level agreement (SLA) prioritizing issues so that the most critical issues are resolved fastest.

You can contact G.K. Chitta at [email protected]

Key Words: IT Management, Infrastructure, Outsource, Crisis Response, Disruption, Business Intelligence, Database Management, Remote Data Center, Outsource Partner  [like]