Designing products for cost and production considerations requires customers and Solectron to share intellectual property (IP) and work together, starting with the earliest stages of design. In handling a customer's sensitive technology intellectual property, trust is imperative.

At Solectron, we focus on providing product design services for product categories where customers place a high priority on protecting their IP.

When customers partner with Solectron in design, they get to market faster, at lower cost and with higher quality levels than they can consistently achieve on their own. With more than 80 percent of a product's price and supply chain performance determined in the collaborative product design phase, customers find that early design involvement with Solectron is crucial to the success and speed of eventual production.

For instance, when Solectron engineers are involved early in the product development phase, proper design decisions are made early in the development cycle, avoiding costly re-designs and re-manufacturing processes. Solectron engineers embedded in a customer's product development team also apply DfX (Design for X) practices such as Design for Lean Six Sigma, which when combined with Lean Six Sigma manufacturing can save upwards of 15 percent in product life cycle costs - from the initial design phase to manufacturing and repair.