DesignSpark eases progress from concept, prototyping to production

RS Components is quite excited about their latest offering: the DesignSpark "gateway to online design support and resources." Chris Page, general manager of the electronics division at RS Components talked to EE Times Asia executive editor Vivek Nanda about it.

EE Times Asia: Can you give us some background about why RS Components decided to create DesignSpark?

Page: Over the last five years there's been a dramatic change in the way design engineers are supported 锟? We want to make it easy for engineers around the world to search, select and design.

Page: We decided that we would step up and turbocharge the electronics business锟?.We formed what we call our strategic marketing team. .. Then we talked to a large number of design engineers and said "This is what we were thinking of doing. What do you think?" The engineers then made some changes and gave their suggestions.

Over the last five years there's been a dramatic change in the way design engineers are supported in our industry globally. This is happening from Europe, APac, to the Americas. Five years ago there were digital engineers, analog engineers, software engineers, etc. But everyone has cut back on the number of engineers in their department. Today, we seem to have a general type of engineer, there's no real specialist. Of course in the massive corporate companies there are. But there are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies out there. And so what they're doing is they're starting to look online for some of the solutions. So everything is going online.

So DesignSpark is a website?

Page: We call it an online gateway. We want to make it easy for engineers around the world to search, select and design and then of course buy from RS.

There are millions of sites for an engineer to go to, whether it be from the suppliers themselves and some other online communities. What we want to do is to be their trusted gateway or the trusted source for the engineers to come to us themselves.

There are about ten stages that a design engineer goes through. From concept—for example, somebody comes down and says I need a new widget—to searching and looking for product parts, evaluating them, and then going to the PC for board design, and then going into the mechanical pieces that go inside the box of the application and then prototype to production. What we are doing is, we are providing support for the engineers through all the stages.