How One Can Estimate The Manufacturing Cost For A Brand New Electronic Product Case Study: Bluetooth Device
Today I’m offering a step-by-step information for estimating the manufacturing price for a hypothetical tracking device that incorporates Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), GPS, an accelerometer, and a USB rechargeable lithium battery. When you've gotten a brand new product that you need to develop, the first thing you should do is have a look at the massive picture earlier than you get bogged down in the main points. You don’t need to jump right into totally creating a production prototype. Product development is costly, time-consuming, and anti-loss gadget dangerous so there are some upfront steps you should take first. Instead, first deal with what I call a preliminary production design (or ItagPro sometimes just known as a preliminary product design). The hot button is that it focuses on a manufacturable version of your product, and never just on a Proof-of-Concept (POC) prototype. One of the most important reasons for creating a preliminary design is it allows you to accurately estimate the manufacturing cost for the product before you spend the money to totally develop it.
A preliminary production design focuses on answering a number of the necessary questions that you simply will need to know as quickly as possible. How difficult is it going to be to develop your product? Is it feasible to manufacture your product? What is the price to develop your product? What's the associated fee to scale from a prototype to quantity manufacturing? How much will it price per unit to manufacture your product? Ultimately, one among crucial questions you want to reply is how a lot will it price to manufacture your product. The manufacturing price is going to determine how much profit you'll make and the way a lot you may promote it for. Manufacturing cost is one thing you could know as early as possible. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of first absolutely designing their product for production. After all that’s accomplished, they return and begin determining how a lot it’s going to value to manufacture. That’s not the best way experienced tech corporations do it.
They answer all the big questions earlier than they begin sinking assets into absolutely creating the product. There isn't any level in spending the entire time to attempt to develop a brand new product if it isn’t feasible to manufacture, or costs a lot to manufacture. A preliminary manufacturing design gives you all of the knowledge needed to accurately estimate the manufacturing value for anti-loss gadget a brand new product before the product has been totally developed. It additionally gives you early insight into the manufacturing feasibility of your product. By beginning with a preliminary production design it permits you to extra accurately estimate your entire prices, create a extra accurate timeline of milestones, and be able to raised determine the manufacturing feasibility of the product. Ultimately, it means that you can develop a greater product that's extra probably to achieve success. The first step in creating a preliminary manufacturing design is to design the system stage block diagram. Our hypothetical product consists of 4 primary capabilities: Bluetooth Low-Energy microcontroller, GPS, an accelerometer, and energy administration.
Figure 1 - System block diagram for a hypothetical BLE GPS tracking device. The core of the product shall be a Bluetooth Low Energy microcontroller. This includes both the Bluetooth Low Energy radio and the microcontroller operating your firmware code. Those two features are embedded on a single chip referred to as a System-on-a-Chip (SoC). However, I all the time recommend that you simply begin off utilizing a pre-certified module solution, as a substitute of a chip-based mostly solution, for any wireless functionality, like Bluetooth Low Energy. This module will nonetheless be based on a BLE SoC but it will also embody the antenna. There are two reasons why you must start with a module. First, the usage of a module drastically reduces your FCC certification value. That may prevent about $10,000 to certify your product. The second cause is that modules will simplify the design process. Wireless performance tends to be arduous to design properly. In reality, very possible, it would require a number of iterations to get issues excellent.
Using a module reduces your time to market which is always essential. Even large tech corporations begin off using a module to allow them to get their product to market quicker. If you happen to scale up to producing 100,000 items or more, then it may be an excellent time to change to a customized chip design to maximize your revenue margin. The opposite massive piece involved with this product is GPS (Global Positioning System) which communicates with the BLE microcontroller by way of a UART serial interface. As with BLE, we’re going to additionally use a module answer for GPS. The first cause for using a GPS module is a bit different, however. GPS is a obtain-only know-how. You’re not deliberately transmitting radio waves outside of your product. This is in contrast to Bluetooth Low Energy, the place you're clearly receiving and transmitting information. The FCC is primarily fascinated within the electromagnetic energy a product radiates (transmits), not what a product receives.