Solving A Customer’s Problem

I got an interesting call today from a new customer and it started me on problem solving quest that I can’t finish. Maybe someone who drops by here can help.
This customer had ordered some of our Electratrac multi-outlet extension cords and was interested in getting some more. The problem came from the fact that the outlet spacing that his project required was different than those on the standard Electratrac 50 foot 12 gauge cable. He was a display designer for a museum and found the Electratrac product to be useful for putting together temporary displays.
This guy was familiar with the original design process and patenting of the first Electratrac product so we had a lengthy discussion about how hard it was to get good design to market.

The problem was this:
The manufacturer was happy to consider a custom size and custom outlet spacing, but their first question to me, the distributor, was “how many containers do you want?”. This great product, conceived by an American farmer and distributed from a warehouse in Chicago, is made in China. This meant that not only would there be several months of lag time while submitting new (even simple) design information, making new tooling (necessary since the Electratrac outlets and ends are molded on) and the actually manufacturing and ocean shipping of the product. This meant that the American distributor couldn’t even consider taking on my customers problem unless they had a purchase commitment for thousands of cables. Our customer needed six.

So where am I going with this? The real dilemma that I faced was how to combine a real customer’s need with an opportunity to innovate. Certainly, creating a multi-outlet extension cord with a different length and outlet spacing barely qualifies as innovation. Its more like some form of re-inventing the wheel. The work of conceiving and designing the product has been done. How can we simply adapt it to make it useful for more applications without having to go through the incredibly complicated, expensive and time consuming process that would be required to make exactly what our customer needs-to say nothing about what to do with the other 2494 cables that Electratrac would have to import and we would have to commit to buy-remember the “how many container lots do you need” that started this discussion?

Maybe the continuation of offshoring the manufacturing of goods will actually lead to a new renaissance of Ameican innovation. The need for quick turnaround of new products in small quantities could well take advantage of the kind of manufacturing prowess that the US developed after World War II.

Small machine shops, foundries and factories and were quick to the market with new ideas-the work being done by young people, men and women, who used their opportunities in the military to learn new skills that could be applied to civilian applications.

We’ve got an idea for a new product in development that might solve our customers multioutlet cable need.

Check back at this space soon and I will tell you more.

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