By Tom Gilchrist, Vice President & COO
We are continually developing new products and refining existing product designs at Bauer. The availability of new test stand components and instruments as well as customer requirements, both capability and budget have traditionally driven this process. Over the last year we have added the process of looking forward and outward to find new products and product improvements to serve the customer better.
Designing custom equipment in a modular fashion allows us to focus our design effort on all areas of design. Often the modularity of our design is not structural modules, but circuitry, instrumentation and software modules associated with specific component requirements. Having a base product that is configured to accept various modules allows us to build a design for a new test stand faster and to focus our attention on the areas that require new development.
To help us continually push the envelope, we look to our customers, OEMs and our vendors for ways to improve the flexibility, user friendliness and ergonomic design of our equipment. Having flexibility in the design allows us to start with a proven design and quickly add component capability without having to start over. This also makes the equipment more easily upgraded after installation if new capability is desired. User firendly features are typically born from real world experiences and we benefit from our strong customer relations particularly in this area. We have established periodic meetings for the engineering staff and sales staff to share customer observations and experiences. Ergonomic and user friendly designs usually do not happen on the first lap, it takes review and consideration. We have implemented more strenuous design reviews involving a broad range of the company's resources to accomplish this. We are also making customer visits and web meetings with the customer part of our review process.
We provide solutions in this business and we know that we are not the only available source of ideas. We are putting effort in to get out to the customer early in the sales cycle or project so we have time to incorporate features and ideas that customers will value and appreciate.