Feasibility Plan I.

I think working through the written report and presentation for the feasibility plan helped Adrianto and I start to get a clear picture of how our rain suite business might work.  Not only how the numbers work but also what our marketing mix could look like.  However there is still one big component of our marketing mix that is still not well defined, product.  Sure we know that we are making, a rain suite, however we only know the features that it should have and not what the final form of the product looks like.  This has me a little concerned because although we error on the conservatively high side for our manufacturing and design cost estimates this is still an unknown for us.  Furthermore there is some really cool nanotechnology that I recently came across from Dharma Innovations that produces portable instant cooling/heating elements for soft goods.  This kind of technology would be great for helping to create a comfortable climate controlled garment for our motorcyclist to wear in the heat of Jarkarta.  However at over $100 per unit for this technology there is no chance it would work for our customer L.

This was a bit of an extreme example but I chose it to try and illustrate another challenge related to managing production costs that I think Adrianto and I will face when we get into the design of our rain suite, feature creep.  Feature creep is a concept that I have become familiar with in another one of my classes and it is essentially the risk that adding additional features to a product will just complicate it, rather than offer improvements while maintaining a simple design.  I imagine there are dozens of new technologies out there in materials and nanotechnologies, like Climaware mentioned above, that are probably not really necessary but could make for a really cool rain suite.  So I think it is really a question of how to manage feature creep during a product development cycle?  Fortunately for us we have given ourselves a short timeline and a meager budget for development which I think will help keep our ideas in check.