So You’re Doing Hardware…Efficiently?

How do you know? I mean, if you’ve been in the biz. for a while, you’ve probably got all sorts of metrics that you use to track this.
OTOH, if you’re just getting into the game — either as a new biz, or through an unexpected promotion — then, well, how do you know?

There are many, many ways to do this, but there is One Simple Trick (sorry!) that you can use to figure out how things are progressing, and that involves looking at your BOM. What you want to do is keep track of it, and more importantly, keep track of how frequently it changes. (•)
To put it simply, the more frequently it changes,
a) the more rework you have to do to just get the system back to steady-state, and
b) the less opportunity you have to build stuff on top of the hardware

Remember, hardware, in general, is far less tolerant of incessant adjustments (yeah, neither is software, but it gets much worse with hardware). And, all the time you spend in fixing everything that broke with your latest BOM update is time that you’re not spending on building the actual value-add on top of the hardware!

So yeah, track your BOM, and if you see it constantly moving, start worrying!

(•) BTW, the changes to the BOM aren’t necessarily because of supplier issues, or because stuff Doesn’t Work. It is much more likely that your marketing team (or Product Manager) gets back to you with the dreaded “Hey, it’s too expensive, we need to reduce the price” leading to the usual sequence of swapping out an antenna, which leads to changing the casing, which leads to changing the leads, which leads to…eventually everything changing. But that’s another story.