About Titoma Design For China Manufacturing Product Design company in Taiwan, Taiwan
Titoma means "Time To Market". We avoid delays and quality issues, by involving trusted factories in China & Taiwan very early on. Our B2B clients need to stay focused on sales and software, so we take care of the complete design and manufacturing of
Founded by Case Engelen in 2001 after he had set-up and managed the Taiwan Branch of Well Design a Dutch industrial design and mechanical engineering firm.
In the early years Titoma worked with Taiwanese and Chinese ODM factories to do the majority of the product development but as hard as we worked on keeping communication smooth that approach had a lot of problems the first being that more often than not it would take ages.
We engineer and manufacture embedded electronic products often around STM32 Bluetooth from Nordic and WiFi from ESP. Many are wirelessly connected Internet Of Things (IoT) and we also make industrial equipment.
Most of our clients know they need to manufacture in China because of its still unsurpassed supplier ecosystem and cost. They have tried dealing with the manufacturers in China themselves but eventually got tired of the persistent disconnect between their design team in the US and the factory in China.
ODM factories specialize in a certain kind of product say laptops for which they make a basic design which they then customize and brand for whomever is interested.
They have many years of experience with their product category which is great. Development cost and unit cost are likely to be low and for a complex product this is can be the best way to go. Trying to design an LCD projector or phone from scratch would mean many cycles of trial and error.
A disadvantage is that they just as easily make the same product for your direct competitor or even their own brand. You do not get to own the design especially in China this can feel like being taken hostage losing control of pricing.
Another big issue is that when youre not a large brand promising 100K units a month in sales you tend to be low priority and the process can take a very long time. We ourselves tried working with ODMs for quite a few years and learned some valuable lessons.
OEM factories basically make whatever electronics you ask them to make and in the last years they have also started to incorporate product development teams. When you start talks with them you tend to meet an awesome set of engineers who really know their stuff.
But these tier 1 factories are really focused on clients who do at least $50 million per year. Upper management tells their underlings that up and coming companies are important but typically their PMs work on 3 to 5 clients at the same time and if HP has a problem there will be little attention for your smaller project. Every factory has his own Pamp;L responsibility and so every manager is mostly interested in their own units current sales and profitability. For them putting 30 engineers on an order of 3K pcs is not good for their numbers.
Another issue with the big international firms such as Flex is that they often claim that transition from their American plant to their factory in China will be seamless.
This is unfortunately not the case transferring a program can take a year. One client said to us recently that they would rather first have Jabil do the DFM in Canada and just accept the higher cost for the pilot run and once that is done they would transfer manufacturing to their Shenzhen factory to achieve the target cost they needed. This doesnt make sense DFM is not some universal standard but rather the optimization of a design for 1 particular factory plus importantly the many suppliers of custom parts. If later you move to China youll be dealing with a completely different set of vendors and you will need to all the customization and validation again. Except that at this point your design is likely frozen and certified already so many options to optimize are gone.
One of the most important things in manufacturing is to find a right sized factory small enough so the boss will show up when you visit them. Your importance to the factory correlates directly with the speed they will resolve issues. So if you want your emails answered you need a right-sized factory but the problem is that a factory which gets enthusiastic about a 3000 pcs order tends to have very limited engineering capability and while theyre often very willing communicating with them is not always easy if you dont master Chinese.
High-end electronic design consultancies charge US$ 1 to 3 million per project. Part of this cost is explained by the fact that they fly their $200/hr engineers over to China for months on end to implement the design to the China factory. As with any consultancy their business model is to sell hours so getting things done quickly unfortunately is not in their interest.
The consultants from Dragon are very good but they expect you to have a mature design which is 95% complete and they then will help you find a suitable factory and interface with them. We feel doing DFM (Design For Manufacturing) when youre already at 95% is way too late to make meaningful adjustments at that point the vast majority of the design choices have already been made. Changing for a more economical MCU or camera module can easily imply half a year of re-work.
To be competitive in electronics you need to use the components and parts of the greater China supply chain. Designing in a vacuum in the West and then sending over your design to Asia will not help much because at that point its much too late to change active components such as say a camera module. We select the best value for money components and generally involve all manufacturers very early on in the design. This avoids endless iterations which will cause you to miss your market window.
Our clients pay a fee for the design and development and so fully own the IP and are not locked in. This keeps us very motivated to make sure youre happy with our service and competitive pricing.
We have some 45 engineers and do all design and prototyping in-house in our design center in Taiwan. Most of the firmware design is implemented in our lab in Colombia in the same time-zone as our US clients. Our Taipei office focusses on integrating the electronics with the mechanical housings our Mandarin speaking Mechanical Engineers discuss mold design directly with the mold makers in China.
Our design fees are very reasonable and we generally quote fixed budgets so we have zero incentive to drag things on. Quite the contrary our goal and that of our cluster of partners is to get to mass manufacturing of your electronics as quickly as possible. At the same time Reliability is even more important to us than speed because unlike a design firm we will actually be responsible for any returned products.
We make it our business to fully understand our clients core technology once we have developed a first generation product we continue to develop many different permutations and application of that same core principles. We act as our clients IP custodians and take on only one client per product category.
Getting a new electronic product designed amp; manufactured reliably requires a lot of time and a lot of expertise.
The big manufacturers are generally not interested enough in small orders to give you that kind of attention the smaller factories are often eager but severely lack in engineering talent and communication.
Westerns electronic design consultancies are very good but not cheap and even though they claim they know a factory in China in reality they often work very much in isolation. You can then hire China Manufacturing experts to improve DFM but doing it this late in the process wastes valuable time amp; resources.
To be fast and cost effective electronic design needs to be done in Asia in close cooperation with the factories.
Titoma combines world-class engineering talent on-site with a right sized factory in Taiwan or China.
Sounds like a match? Book a free consult with our CEO Case Engelen now.
Titoma helps B2B companies with the complete design and manufacturing in Asia of electronic products.
We focus on wirelessly connected embedded electronics.
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We design mostly around STM32, PIC32, Bluetooth from Nordic and WiFi from ESP. Many are wirelessly connected, Internet Of Things (IoT) and we also make manufacturing equipment. We protect IP by doing design & prototyping of the complete device in Taiw