Peer-to-peer approach simplifies project plan to product launch

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Sep 07, 2021

Enabling customers to focus on their core competencies and capabilities whilst our experience enables us to take care of your display and embedded needs.

At Anders, we believe that we work in a different way from others in the display and embedded industry.  Really? I hear you ask. But, yes, I can confidently reply.

After listening intently to our customers, we developed our business model to introduce a method that we’ve entitled our ‘peer-to-peer’ model where we introduce our ‘buddy approach.’  Through this tactic, we simplify the design plan through to product launch, for all our customers, which ultimately helps to bring your ideas to life quicker, often in industries where speed to scale really matters.

Get comfy, grab yourself a cuppa and let us tell you all about it.  Introducing our Anders ‘buddies’ Mike, Rhett, and myself, Steven.

Getting to Know Us

Steven McGough

The customer experience journey begins with me, business development. Covid-19 has thrown many challenges into our paths, but never a company to shy away from a challenge, we have utilised the many communications platforms open to us e.g., Zoom, Teams, LinkedIn etc, to keep our customers project wheels turning.

We’ve found that post our customer enquiry, our Anders team can jump onto a call quickly, where we are able to do the same activities that a face-to-face meeting brought, but we feel that we cut to project objectives much faster, share specifications, and instantly invite additional people onto the call.

You can open the conversation to Rhett who is our Embedded Business Development Manager, and Mike who is our Senior Product Manager and Display expert, and our customers invite their counterparts within their organisation, which is why we call this our ‘buddy approach.’ 

Steve McGough from Anders

Rhett and Mike are my ‘buddies’ in our ‘peer-to-peer communications ‘approach, which is based on aligning the relevant people in Anders to their counterparts in our customers organisation. We find that compared to bouncing emails around, we get to the bones of the inquiry at an early stage.. Here's what they have to say:

Getting to know us: Rhett Evans

As Steven states, from the very start of the project, the early engagement stage, we like to speak to the customer from an engineering point of view about their project.

Experience dictates that no one shoe size fits all when it comes to our customers projects and project requirements vary from customer to customer. This is where the power of Anders kicks in and we start the conversation by correcting an inaccurate market perception of Anders. Displays can often be a commodity, but we at Anders prefer to engage with customers at the early stage of design to understand project requirements and deliver a tailor-made solution that is fit for purpose and commercially viable for our customers’ market segment.

It may be the case that the customer only wants embedded or maybe only wants display because they have secured the embedded part, either or, both is within the Anders wheelhouse. But it is good for us to be able to look at it from a holistic perspective rather than simply, "what is it you want/need?" followed by, "yes, we can try to do that for you.”

The experience that we’ve gained throughout the years working in various market segments worldwide, typically means that there aren’t many challenges that we’ve not seen and addressed with a solution.

Rhett Evans - Business Manager Embedded

For our customer, they benefit as we can often provide them with consultation and guidance to look for benefits that they may not have considered. This approach speeds up the design to successful product launch within our customers’ timescales avoiding redesign and worst-case scenario failure in the field.

Getting to know us: Mike Logan

Rhett brings up an excellent point, and this is why it’s important to bring in an engineering mind as soon as possible in the design process. What a lot of people underestimate is that even though there are many situations where a display commodity will be ample, there are many situations where it will not be.

Where the application demands our customers to consider:

  • Usage
  • Environmental
  • Reliability
  • Safety
  • Regulatory & compliance
  • Longevity

Through our buddy approach and peer-to-peer communications, we get to these points at the beginning rather than halfway through or even at the end of the project. This enables us to design the right solution for the application. Can you imagine the benefits of that? Mainly your time right, and you can really put a price on that, can you?

So, our conversation, from an engineering perspective starts with:

  • What are the main features you’re looking for?
  • Who are your users?
  • What are your main challenges?
Mike Logan - Senior Product Manager at Anders Electronics

This enables us to consider:

What do we need to do to ensure that we can select the right solution that will go into their end product, perform to their expectation and at the right price?

When we adhere to our peer-to-peer model, we find that customers tend to open up quicker and tell us a bit more about their application because the more we know about an application, the better we can design a solution to fit.

Quicker communications

There are a lot of nuances to an actual inquiry, where that's why it's so important to have the right people on our call early in the engagement because there can be so many, as Mike has mentioned, intricacies to something that people aren't necessarily considering. Sometimes, they might be asking something that's over the spec that they require. That's why it's so important to find out what the application is. Like Mike said, where is it going? There are so many different questions. What's powering the display? To have everyone in a call is probably the difference between an hour of communication, rather than two weeks' worth of emails back and forth.

anders team on a zoom call

Ready to jump on a call to discuss your requirements? Get in touch!