Say you have an idea for a product. This product consists of some electronics, a plastic case, power requirements, maybe a server or an API, a mobile app, a web front end, etc. You might not want large quantities to start with, or your niche just doesn’t need thousands of units per month. You also need a product in the end, not just a module – and you might need exclusivity for your particular case.

There are a couple of ways to get there...

First you could develop it yourself, find the developers for hardware/software, for manufacturing, for certification, etc. There are plenty of companies that can help out with one or multiple of those aspects as well.

When you go this route, you usually have a decent business plan and the financial backing to succeed. However you will face a moderately long time to market, and if you want small volume, a very high per-unit cost.

Secondly, you could hire an OEM to do the heavy lifting for you. You'll often need to be able to commit to significant quantity for most of them though. Some will provide smaller quantities at usually a much higher price. You'll also need some upfront NRE (Non Recurring Engineering) and development costs. This will include plastic mold engineering/manufacturing costs, electronics development, firmware development, etc. which can all add up since these are often subcontracted, and each supplier adds their own profit margin.

Thirdly, you could also find a company that has something similar to what you need, but with missing aspects, or the wrong plastics, or wrong power supply, or it needs to do something different, etc. In essence, the base technology is there, it just needs to be customized for your specific needs. It would make sense to work with this company to make changes to the base product to meet your requirements, but often the company in question went with the first or second route themselves and are already committed to their customers and markets, or just consider their product proprietary and don’t feel comfortable sharing their intellectual property. In other words, building customized versions of their hardware/software/case/etc. is not really what they want/can do.

This is what we do differently. Yes, we do custom development just like the first option if needed. But we also designed our own existing products with extensibility in mind because we know there are many use cases that we didn't think off. For that reason we can offer custom plastics, power supply, expansion modules, etc. to fit your specific use cases.

Take our GeoNode for example. In the most basic sense it's a GPS tracker. Now suppose you need a GPS tracker that wakes up once a day, sends its coordinates and has a battery life of several months. Or one that is solar powered, has a small battery and should be housed in a round plastic sphere. Or one that contains an altimeter to activate when it reaches a certain altitude (e.g. skydiving application). Or one that logs data to an SD card as well. Or one that fits a bike, or a car specific version, or... you get the idea.

Every time there is a change to the hardware, CE certification needs to be performed again since it's considered a new product. There are code validation and verification tasks besides the code changes themselves. There are security reviews, HALT testing, plastic molds to be developed, electronics to be designed, prototypes developed and made, antenna selections, etc. These would normally be covered by a development fee and NRE costs, but many customers needing relatively low quantity (1K, 5K, 10K units total) don't want to deal with that, or don't even understand those aspects. They just want a tracker that does what they need it to do, and want a price per unit with a data plan (or not) and a server API/website/app/integration… (or not).

We offer that last capability. You start with the base tracker, add/change to your needs and we quote you a per unit price based on your desired quantity and that's it. Not a prototype; the final product. No separate development bill, no NRE, no plastic mold bill, no CE certification bill - all your costs are factored in to the final per unit cost. Once you sign the contract, we start the work. Will this per unit cost be higher than a random (usually lower quality) off the shelf version? Probably. Will it still be competitively priced for your margin? Yes, it probably will. How? Because we perform almost all development in house. We write the embedded code, we write the server code, we develop the electronics, we build the plastics, we do the CE certification... This means we don't rely on external OEMs or subcontractors or outsourcing (with added delay in back and forth with designs and requests). This also means we can answer your questions regarding features, designs, etc. on the spot. All of this means we can be very competitive compared to the other methods of developing the product, but it also means we can be very competitive with existing products in the market because of our lower overhead (even taking local engineering cost into account).

We’re deliberately doing this only with our GeoNode for the time being. We have other ideas which we might implement in the future, but for now the GeoNode forms the core of many other projects we are doing (i.e., Smart City projects, etc.), so it makes sense to stay focused on that.

About WRD Systems

We’ve been developing embedded systems and their surrounding infrastructure, and have been consulting in the field for over a decade. We put a special focus on security and low power. Some of our goals are to work with local industry (PCB production, component suppliers, etc.), which leads to all of our development and manufacturing being done in Europe and the USA. This allows us to provide the highest quality, yet we still remain price competitive.



