Titoma: Integrated Design and Manufacture of Electronics in Asia

Titoma, the Time To Market company, was established in 2000 in Taiwan to help clients design and manufacture Western-quality electronic products at Chinese prices.

When specifying and designing an electronic product, there are numerous trade-offs to be considered. Is adding this or that extra function worth the increased cost? Should we make the housing from aluminum or chromed plastic? To be able to make an informed choice between options you need to know the real cost and time impact of each alternative, and plenty of ideas need to be bounced back and forth between the designers and the manufacturers of the various components.

To be cost competitive these days, virtually all electronic products are manufactured in China or Taiwan, so this then also is where all the input for the design needs to come from. But with the distance, language barriers, cultural differences, and differing manufacturing habits, these kinds of discussions become very complex and tend to waste a lot of time—and therefore money—especially as shortened life cycles seriously reduce the time window in which you have to make your profit.

There are numerous large integrated factories in China, but there is not a single factory which can completely design and manufacture something like an Ipad. To convert an idea into a successful electronic product, a great number of individuals all need to work in unison: industrial designers, mechanical engineers, user interface designers, electronic designers, a multitude of component suppliers, mold makers, packaging designers, injection and paint shops and assembly factories. Trying to coordinate all these people from the West when the bulk of the work is done in Asia is for most companies an insurmountable undertaking, and often leads to endless finger pointing when things go wrong.

Designing a product with an attractive value proposition is one, getting it made correctly and consistently so for each batch can be just a big a headache when you’re not familiar with the way things work in Asia. Just read the book Poorly Made in China.

After many fruitless trips of senior management more and more firms now come to the conclusion that to achieve the desired results quickly, they need a local firm to assume responsibility for everything — one able to make decisions on the spot, because it completely understands what its Western client needs to achieve.

Titoma offers mid-sized brand owners an integrated solution, taking responsibility for the complete project from start to finish. Titoma is the main contractor and for every project selects the most appropriate factory, design team, mold maker, prototype shop, component suppliers, and approval agency.

Titoma’s project managers and engineers have accumulated a wealth of experience in how to get products to market as quickly as possible in Asia, and any potential issue is quickly resolved by getting all parties round the table locally and hashing things out in the local language. We negotiate the best deals, and generally act as our client’s eyes and ears on the ground, or as we like to call it their IP Custodian, making sure information is divulged to suppliers on a need-to-know basis only.

This way Titoma’s clients save on time, money, and aggravation. This leaves them free to focus on what they do best: coming up with great new ideas and selling them to their markets.

Design For Asian Manufacturing

Over the years, the design professionals at Titoma have accumulated a body of knowledge, which we have coined Design For Asian Manufacturing. It consists of the following principles:

1. Leverage existing platforms
The biggest factor in saving time and cost is not to try re-inventing the wheel, but using existing technology platforms instead as a basis for your new product. So if Titoma is asked to design a mouse with a joystick added to it, we find a mouse maker eager to cooperate, and 3 weeks later we have a fully functioning PCB. The mouse factory makes 1 million mice a year, and has done so for the past 10 years, so they have tested all possible components and know which ones deliver the best value for money. By using their solution, we take advantage of their experience and buying power, and save significant time in testing and tweaking.

2. Use Asian components
Over 80% of the cost of an electronic device is in the components, so it is on the BOM (Bill Of Materials) that competitive battles are won and lost. Quite often clients have their PCB designed by a team in the West which conveniently uses Western suppliers, or even catalogues such as Digikey or Arrow for their component selection. They then come to Asia expecting a 50% lower quote on their PCB assembly, because Chinese products sell for half the price their factory can make it for. They’re in for a big disappointment, because Western components cost about the same the world over. Asian design teams realize the bulk of their cost advantage by using Taiwanese or Chinese equivalents. But to be able to base a design on a Taiwanese IC you need support on drivers from the Taiwanese IC supplier, and that support in many cases only comes in Chinese.

3. Design once: For China Manufacturing
Frequently, we still see clients who first ask a firm in the West to design a proof of concept, and then in a second step optimize the design for mass manufacturing in Europe. They then find production needs to be relocated to China to stay competitive. Importantly, because of lengthy certification and approval procedures, the design can no longer be changed. This means the cost savings which can be realized are only limited, because many of the components and methods which make China cheap cannot be incorporated anymore. All this is of course is a big waste of time and money. Trying to launch an innovative product by selling in small quantities at premium price is suicide these days, as the high price only invites copycats. We firmly believe the only way to success is to design for low cost manufacturing in China right from the get go. Of course you need to make sure IP is handled very carefully.

4. Specify results, not processes
Philips had a completely automated production line for CD and DVD covers. The costs in Holland were getting too high so they moved the line to Austria. When they found they were still not cost competitive enough, they moved the line to China. The problem was that they needed to constantly fly in expensive European engineers to program new set-ups and generally keep the equipment running. After seeing these costs pile up for a couple of months, the Chinese manager of the plant managed to save a lot of money by dumping the automated line and doing the work the China way: a much more manual process.

The moral of this story is that in order to profit from low costs production in China, it makes sense to do things the China way. But of course a balance needs to be struck, nobody wants his brand to be associated with unsavory labor practices, so Titoma always keeps always maintains very strict standards in this area.

5. Rethink Labor vs. Investment in capital goods
In the West, if you want to make a plastic part with a rubber grip, we often use a process called co-injection, where we first inject a hard plastic such as ABS, and then use a second barrel on the same injection machine to inject a softer material such as TPE.
This method requires a set of molds which is up to 4 times more expensive than a mold for the same part without the TPE. It also requires the use of an expensive co-injection machine. If you are making 3 million toothbrushes a month, this all makes sense, but for many products all this up-front investment is prohibitive, especially in these uncertain times.

In China, Titoma uses what we call the "Sneaker Method," where we first inject the ABS part in mold A, then have a worker walk the part over to the next injection machine where it is carefully placed in mold B to receive its layer of TPE. Because the ABS part is still warm, the bonding between the two materials is good, and you do get a nice soft grip. Using this method you pay only 2 times the mold cost, and as our China molds are on average about 50% cheaper than in the West, you achieve the same result while saving 75% on your mold budget.

6. Leverage local knowledge
A Dutch client asked a Dutch designer to make the CAD for a hair gel vending machine. Titoma was asked to quote on making the molds for all the big plastic parts. We also talked with a factory boss who had been designing vending machines for the last 20 years. He told us the client’s concept of a big gel tank did not make any sense, because the system would quickly clog up if there were no clients for a week. Instead he recommended we put the gel in sachets and use his condom vending machine as a platform. The set-up cost and time to make a first working prototype out of vandalism proof metal were minimal, and without any investment in molds the first batch of 100 units was quickly shipped out.

7. Trust in Allah, but tie your camel
Getting the design right can be a challenge, but making sure the product is actually manufactured as it is specified is just as important a task in China. The fact that the first sample looks good doesn’t guarantee a thing for the quality of the later batches. An American brand of sport shoes had been making shoes with Mr. Huang’s factory for some time without problems. But suddenly they found out that the transparent logo’s which were glued on the white shoes started to turn yellow, and they had to recall 350,000 pairs. It turned out that Mr. Huang had saved himself a few dollars by switching to cheaper glue, of course without telling his client. Chinese factories are world champions at saving cost, but left un-checked they frequently get overzealous at the expense of their clients.

Conclusion
So in short, to be competitive in electronics you need to manufacture in Asia, and it makes a lot of sense to do the product development in Asia as well. Titoma makes it possible to entrust your complete development project to professional Western management, on-site in Taiwan and China. We make it our job to know what you want and the quality you expect, and deliver just that, faster and more economical than anybody else.

Sign up for our Email Newsletter

Product Development, Project Management, Industrial Design, Value Engineering, Rapid Prototyping, Electronic Design, RF Design, Component Sourcing, China Plastic Injection Molds, Tooling and Molding, Die Casting, Medical Parts, High Precision Molding, Metal Stamping, China Manufacturing, PCB Manufacturing, Quality Control