The realities of the new economy are upon us. Finance pundits are no longer debating if the “R word” is an appropriate descriptor, but when it actually started.
In bringing the electronic design industry together, the Xuropa Platform was envisioned to address a number of issues. The most timely one is costs. How do you reduce costs using Xuropa?
Reduce Travel Budgets: Use Xuropa Online Labs
Electronic design tools are extremely complex and sophisticated pieces of software. Educating potential users of your tools can take time and several costly trips (long gone are the days when all of your users were in Silicon Valley). The process looks something like this:
- Introductory presentation
- In-depth technical presentation
- Demonstration
- Demonstration to a larger team
- Training
- Installation and evaluation
- Probably more training to a larger team
Sometimes these steps iterate through the same design team. Alternatively the wider audience to be brought in is at a different location requiring a different on-site visit.
To keep things simple, let’s say everything went smoothly and only 4 different visits were needed. There are two employees (applications engineer and a business person at minimum) over 4 trips lasting five nights each. (You’d want to make it a week long trip and meet with other potential users.) We’ll use flights from San Francisco to Frankfurt as representative and not include any intra-European flights to keep it simple.
Looking at an economy class trip (I used Kayak and took almost the cheapest of everything) including hotel room, flights, rental car, minimum per diem and the cost of your two employees’ time. The cost to the company is $32,815. (Nearly a third of this cost is direct expenses, the rest is hidden in salary broken down to an hourly rate. There were no executives on this trip by the way.)
These costs quickly get out of control once we consider how disaggregated our industry now is. For example, a single SoC design team can have locations on three different continents and all need to be brought into the decision making process and be trained.
Hidden Costs and Challenges
Unfortunately it’s not always even this simple though. There’s the opportunity cost of these trips. Choosing between which users to see and also choosing between the support of existing users and bringing in new ones. These are tough decisions, especially for small to medium-sized companies. Unfortunately, the impacts of these decisions are not seen until well after the fact.
The Solution: Xuropa Online Labs
At some point your team will get on a plane and meet with users. It has to happen. However, the objectives of the Xuropa Online Labs are to ensure the following:
- Only absolutely necessary trips are made and you have data to decide which
- Your users are as educated as possible before you step on a plane
- Your team is focused on the right users at the right time
- Your team is leveraged across multiple teams from their desk - not spending most of their productive time in the air or in hotel rooms
How to Use Xuropa Online Labs
A Xuropa Online Lab provides an interactive environment where users and applications engineers can collaborate and communicate to accelerate the early stages of the education process.
- Online presentations, flash demonstrations, videos and technical collateral
- Online interactive demonstration
- Online interactive training
- Online self-driven training
- Online self-driven pre-evaluation
- On-site installation and training for evaluation
All of the online education work is using your tool in a secure environment. The user does not make any downloads, there’s no configuration and no setup required. It’s ready to go when they are.
Crucially, a key aspect of the process is to provide all of this within the same controlled and secure environment that is easily managed and maintained.
Conclusion
The Xuropa Online Lab enables your application engineering team to support and educate in parallel multiple new prospective users independent of geography or time zone.
A key aspect of the process is the ability of new users to learn about your technology on their own time independent of your applications engineers.
And crucially, this is how a Xuropa Online Lab can reduce those 4 trips down to one very productive one with a high probability of success. Xuropa saves you money and saves you time.
Posted under Features, business
This post was written by James Colgan on October 17, 2008
