What is delight? Delight is nothing more than an unexpected pleasant surprise with regards to a particular event, service or product. In this case we are only focusing on an electronic product. In fact we use an even more stringent definition. Therefore, this also means that the enclosure or housing has something to do with your customer’s delight. It is important to note that your customer’s delight is the prerequisite to a recommendation given on a voluntary basis. Even if such recommendation is not provided the customer will become very loyal to your product. Hence, the foundation is built to achieve successful creation of an unassailable competitive advantage. Let’s examine the details of this process.
Psychologists have established that your customer will experience this delight as a much improved value usually with respect to quality expectations. However, your customer will be unable to decipher the exact source of their delight. This is fortuitous as similarly your competitors will also be unable to understand the mechanism behind your success. Thus, your unassailable competitive advantage will be formed.
Let’s scrutinize this proposition from the new product development (NPD) process perspective. The simplest way to truly comprehend this process is to think of a Russian Doll: one doll inside another, another and another…
The first doll or step is to capture knowledge. Codification of the necessary knowledge was achieved by the seminal book: Electronic Enclosures, Housings and Packages. You need to get a hold of this handbook. Unfortunately, you can only buy chapters of this book and not the whole handbook. The price of the book would be $378 that is roughly equivalent to £276 or €323 (depending on the daily exchange rate). This is the core Russian doll; the fundamental building block of all NPD related competitive advantage creation system.
The second step is the insights generation by way of performing an assessment. This process is described by the previously cited handbook. There is however one crucial detail that was omitted. This key forms a trade secret of GB Mentors. An analogy could explain the fundamental nature of this key: trying to mix water with oil. Of course, water and oil is immiscible in each other. Yet, it can be done.
Water is held together by very strong hydrogen bonds. The two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom within water molecules (H2O) form polar covalent bonds. Oils and fats are non-polar. Therefore, oils and fats would have to break water’s hydrogen bonds to dissolve in water. This will not happen hence, the well-known immiscibility of water and oils.
However, water and oil can be mixed in each other if a molecule with a polar and non-polar end can be found that can act as a bridge. Such chemistry is not simple to develop. Nevertheless, it turns out that the common egg can do this trick. Isn’t this simple? You just need to know where to look. Food related enterprises use this trick to their financial advantage. A very similar key was developed by GB Mentors for NPD use.
Therefore, the core in the form of the above mentioned handbook is there but without insights it is utterly useless to create an NPD Treasure Map. The insights creation mechanism was revealed not by an accident but by a painstakingly arduous scientific research at Australia’s Macquarie University. This decade long research was compared to Einstein’s work at the Institute for Advanced Study. Despite the fantastic accolades, industry struggled with the dissemination and practical implementation of the concepts harvested by this fundamental research. Professor Ernest Jordan was credited with coining the apt acronym BCME to describe this process. Thus, it is not accidental that the main email address of GB Mentors today is BCME@gbmentors.uk.
These insights are turned first into actionable-insights then into an optimization routine. Common NPD processes suffer enormously in that they try to abbreviate the process by cutting engineering time. The BCME process goes the opposite way. It increases engineering input while abbreviates total NPD time. How is that possible? We are happy to explain this puzzle in one of our 15 minute no obligation information exchanges.
Implementing this new process means that capital is minimised, part and system quality maximised as well as manufacturability and assembly is fool proofed. The end result is that the product becomes much more sellable with an associated increased retained value. Thus, you could be assured that your customers will be delighted. This ultimately means that an unassailable competitive advantage will be formed. Please note that GB Mentors is very selective in accepting an assignment. GB Mentors will only consider your proposal if it has an electronic enclosure, housing or packaging element. However, GB Mentors will endeavour to suggest an alternative provider should your proposal be found outside of GB Mentor’s current remit and interest.
