How Does the Silicone Rubber Keypad Manufactured by Niceone-tech Make Your Electronic Products More Profitable?

The product with the most complete functions and the best performance in the market is often not necessarily the best-selling product, because it will inevitably be restricted by factors such as price and customer awareness. How to make your products sell well? You need to reduce or maintain the price, while allowing you to increase the profit of your electronic products. The methods are (1) Maintain the product's functions unchanged or eliminate unnecessary functions to reduce costs. (2) When the target cost is fixed, increase the added value of the product. (3) Reduce your product development and testing costs.

How to keep the function of Silicone rubber keypad unchanged or eliminate unnecessary functions to reduce costs:

1. Don't pay too much attention to product performance and ignore product economy (cost):

Eliminate functions that can not bring market value but increase cost: The basic requirement is to retain the silicone rubber keypad function in electronic products in accordance with the market needs. The cost of redundant functions. For example, the customer's silicone rubber keypad does not need to be used in an ultraviolet environment, but uses anti-ultraviolet raw materials. Even if your product comes with this function, it will invisibly increase the cost. If the market and users feel that the anti-ultraviolet function is redundant, then the market and users will not pay extra for this feature.

2. Can't pay attention to the surface cost and ignore the hidden (sunk) cost:

The bottom of the membrane keypad often contacts the Metal dome to form a complete circuit function. Some companies feel that it is possible to independently mount and assemble the Metal dome on the PCB circuit or FPC circuit. After attaching the Silicone rubber keypad, the cost on the surface is indeed lower than the price of a complete Silicone rubber keypad with a Metal dome layer, but it is ignored. The assembly cost of the product and the labor cost of installing the shrapnel will be even higher.

3. Increase product awareness and reduce costs: 

For example: Silicone rubber keypad can sometimes be assembled with a silver membrane switch panel, but the use of Flex copper circuit or PCB as the circuit invisibly increases the cost. When Flex copper circuit or PCB is used as the circuit, in many cases the circuit cannot meet the function of electrical products, but the Silver membrane switch can be used with jumpers to meet the function. What kind of line to use is important to the knowledge of the product, rather than simply picking the most expensive product to solve the problem and increasing the cost.

Niceone-tech provides our assistance in these three areas: 1. The engineering team and the marketing team help customers analyze existing samples, or new samples eliminate functions that can not bring market value but increase costs. 2. The engineering team and production team will help customers analyze sunk costs and focus on overall costs. 3. Due to the high experience of the engineering team, we will give our reference opinions and production guidance to customers. After maintaining unchanged functions or eliminating unnecessary functions, reduce customer costs.

Increase product durability and practicability as much as possible without increasing the target cost, so as to increase market reputation and obtain follow-up orders.

1. It can provide products assembled with a Silicone rubber keypad and Metal dome to reduce customer labor costs: After the Silicone rubber keypad and Metal dome tape are assembled, customers or users can reduce labor costs to install shrapnel and tape. Compared with the European and American markets with relatively high labor costs, the Chinese market has lower labor costs. Reduce product labor costs.

2. By Adding up color material: you can make the buttons form different colors to enhance the aesthetics.

3. Use PU oil to protect the key ink of the Silicone rubber keypad to enhance its wear resistance.

A. Spraying PU can make the product printing not easy to peel off. Even with long-term friction and contact, the ink above the silicone rubber keypad will not be too damaged.

B. After the product is completed, a wear resistance test is required.

4. Use laser carving to make button characters and patterns:：make the product adds a backlight function.

Increase product durability and practicability as much as possible without increasing the target cost, thereby enhancing market competitiveness. This series of operations is not difficult for Niceone-tech's factory which specializes in manufacturing rubber membrane switch, and can even give you a price that is unexpected.

Reduce your product development, proofing and testing costs：

1. Strengthen the cost analysis of new product development to achieve the best combination of cost and performance:

Niceone-tech's engineering team strengthened the analysis of the performance-to-cost ratio of Silicone rubber keypads: performance-to-cost ratio is the ratio between the target performance and the target cost. Through the analysis of this index, it can be seen whether the newly developed Silicone rubber keypad meets the requirements. The originally set target cost, target function and target performance and other related targets. If the actual cost-performance ratio of Silicone rubber keypad is higher than the target cost-performance ratio, under the premise that the design cost is consistent with the target cost, it means that the performance of the new product design is higher than the target performance, but on the other hand, we can still Reduce and cut costs by adjusting the performance of the new product to match the target performance. Consider the cost of expansion: When developing and designing a new product, in addition to the material cost, it is necessary to further consider whether the application of the material will increase the cost in other aspects. For example, whether the materials used are easy to purchase, easy to store, assemble, and ship. In fact, when designing a new product, if the R&D (designer) personnel lack comprehensive consideration, they often have to temporarily add some materials or increase the difficulty of the assembly during the rectification process to solve some of its defects. And these temporarily increased materials will not only increase the material cost, but also increase the assembly complexity in the production process, which indirectly affects the efficiency of mass production, and it is also likely to cause a substantial increase in the consumption of related materials, auxiliary materials, etc. These sunk costs are often far greater than their apparent costs.

2. Reduce the number of times the design needs to be modified before it is delivered to production:

The number of times the design needs to be modified (even minor modifications) before it is delivered to production (normal mass production). This is an indicator for calculating the development cost of a new product. Many facts show that it often takes a long time for a new product to be put into the market in batches. The biggest reason is that the product cannot meet the design requirements at one time and usually needs to be redesigned and retested several times. Assuming that a company estimates that the cost of each design error is 500 USD if each new product needs to be modified on average 5 times before the new product is developed and designed for production, and 15 new projects are introduced and developed each year, the error cost is 37500 USD. From this simple arithmetic, we can see that in the process of delivering normal mass production, every error (every modification) is bound to bring certain losses to the company (materials, labor, waste of efficiency, etc.). The time delay in redesigning products to reduce errors will cause products to enter the market later, and the lost sales due to missed opportunities are even more distressing. Therefore, the development and design of R&D designers should maximize the success rate of a design without affecting the cost and performance.

3. Test cost reduction: 

Test cost including life test, color test, wear resistance test and tactile feedback test are all relatively high costs. Can successfully reduce such costs, then the price will be competitive in the market for customers. Therefore, Niceone-tech purchases a large number of test instruments to reduce customer production costs.

As a pro membrane keyboard manufacturer, we can deal with the above problems: (1) Strengthen the cost analysis of new product development to achieve the best combination of cost and performance. (2) Reduce the number of times that the design needs to be modified before it is delivered to production. (3) Niceone-tech has purchased a large number of test instruments to reduce customers' test costs.

I believe that with the support of the Niceone-tech team and you, we can increase the profit of your electronic products and at the same time become more competitive in the market.