By Keiran Dromgool, New Business Development, Development Centre, Smart Made Simple (SMS).
“I’ve been with Smart Made Simple for one year now, as I commenced my employment in March 2019, and it has been a whirlwind!
My father worked in IT Hardware, so I grew up being super curious of the electronics industry. His job always looked fascinating to me, as he was a bit of a superhero.
I guess that’s why when I was offered an opportunity to pursue a career in electronics, I jumped at it, as this calling to understand challenges and present working solutions was strong.
And my role within SMS hasn’t disappointed. As I looked to join this industry, I did my homework. There are a lot of Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) providers, or Contract Electronic Manufacturers (CEM), in the UK. They all offer prototyping services as well as volume production, but they treat these offerings as two separate entities. Prototyping and New Product Introduction (NPI) become small run jobs within the manufacturing line, which is disruptive to production and manufacturing schedules and can become a frustrating stop-start process as forecast fluctuations or demand priorities shift.
The flexibility that our dedicated Development Centre offers to SMS is quite unique, and this is what made the company so attractive to me as I went through the recruitment process.
The Development Centre offers our customers the complete package. It takes them from their idea, through to their concept, and connects them to the design houses that we partner with. Their journey then continues through to prototyping, and then there is a seamless flow straight into mainland production.
This end-to-end service has proven to be a perfect solution for our customers, as it offers a pain free, seamless, and completely integrated experience. It takes full advantage of our Knowledge Network, where customers can fully benefit from our in-house manufacturing and engineering experience and expertise, which spans 100 years.
The workflow achieved via our Development Centre is also economical to our customers. As within other EMS environments, customers may need to double up their costs to go through NPI, prototyping, and the Design for Manufacture (DFM) process. All of a sudden, mistakes can become costly, and when you are simply requiring proof of concept, extra costs are something that all of our Development Centre customers are trying hard to avoid.
At SMS, these scenarios are not an issue, because our in-house experts are in the same building. The Development Centre takes advantage of the same quality team and the same quality facilities. There’s this great interconnection between our departments. We have our own dedicated engineers within the Development Centre, but our manufacturing engineering department is basically just next door.
This brings us to the next major advantage that our Development Centre customers experience – speed. Again, this is especially essential to start-ups who are looking for proof of concept, but we’ve found speed to be a driving force for all technology companies in the bid for speed-to-market and time-in-market (yield).
Essentially, we’re offering a tailored solution to two types of markets: the start-up and the established OEM, which, prior to SMS’ Development Centre opening, had been neglected.
I’ve found the electronics industry to be large, yet small. It’s a connected world, so only the fittest survive.
Our growth success has been organic. Repeat customer business and word of mouth have enabled the Development Centre to grow from a value-add service to its own fully functioning business. The quality of our work has become a talking point within the start-up community, which has led to a lot of referral business. As stated, SMS has been in the electronics manufacturing industry for 100 years, therefore other technology companies, especially the start-ups, find comfort in this level of knowhow. We essentially offer them product design, component sourcing, and supply chain management consultancy, again looking for ways which they can leverage off of our production builds for component sourcing to achieve economies of scale.
We hold our customers hands, we put our arm around them, and we guide them through the development process to make it as easy and risk-free for them as possible. Afterall, it’s Smart Made Simple.”
Kerian also recently took part in a video interview to highlight the unique benefits that the Smart Made Simple Development Centre brings, watch it here: https://youtu.be/Ka-Mifp10WA. In this short film, we describe our ‘Dedicated Development Centre’ with it’s high-end resources, cutting-edge equipment, and standalone growth strategy, to harness technology in Nottingham, for Nottingham.
About Smart Made Simple – SMS
The U.K.’s leading Manufacturing Service Provider.
From concept to creation, to commercialisation, to customer, for all technology companies. Whether you are a start-up, or an established household brand name, if you have a design, engineering, manufacturing or supply chain problem, thanks to the diversity of our experience and scalable service, SMS has the solution.
Since 1920, SMS has manufactured electronics products from the same home in Nottingham, U.K. For almost 100 years, we have been the company behind the ideas, offering agile and adaptive supply chain solutions, that bring products to market faster, smarter and simpler.
Leader in the specialist low volume, highly complex manufacturing services market space, SMS has earned critical industry facility certifications, that brings full viability and credibility to the aerospace & defence, communications, industrial and medical markets. SMS brings the right scale, capabilities and competitive solutions to customers needing high-reliability attention, product realisation and supply chain optimisation.
For further information, visit www.smartmadesimple.com.
About our dedicated Development Centre: https://smselectronics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/About-our-Development-Centre_FINAL.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/smartmadesimple
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sms-electronics/?trk=company_logo
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIv_AVfzPbDqEVSpKMxu-jg