What is the Turn-key, what to do with the Turn-key, and what to do with the Turn-key.

Reprinted from: http://www.52rd.com/Blog/Detail_RD.Blog_SHRDFresh_52276.html

Typhoon days, heavy rain, sleepy at home, left and right nothing .. Continuing the previous article titled "Qualcomm QRD vs. mediainfo TK, the war that just started", I found many comments about the Turn-key topic, so I saved another article.

 

Now the world is claiming to provide the Turn-key solution, and it seems that there is no way to mix it in the industry without the Turn-key. Chatting with friends also has a frequent topic: What is Turn-key. A relatively brief definition that can be recognized by most people is: Turn-key as a delivery solution. Its main feature is "very close" to a final product form, its ultimate goal is to help customers quickly achieve productization.

The Turn-key scheme is generally translated into "turnkey Scheme ". It means you have a "key" to get on the road. There are also Total solution and public board design. The difference may be in strength. Currently, only the Turn-key of MTK is considered to be in place. The Turn-key seems to be a verb, but I personally think this word should be a noun. Besides describing delivery behaviors, it also implies the people and things involved in building this key, this is the focus of this article.

 

When talking about the delivery of the turn-key, we can intuitively look at these things: hardware, software, design documents, application documents, test reports, and so on. Everyone on Earth knows this .. Not much.

The Turn-key itself should refer to a continuous project, far from being a simple "turnkey. There is a lot of work to be done in this project. For now, they are generally called "Delivery adaptation ".

 

What is "Delivery adaptation "? Describe using a method similar to communication protocol layering-if the innermost layer is the delivery of platform vendors and the outermost layer is the customer, what is in the "middle layer" is "Delivery adaptation ", its function is to adapt the tangible delivery to the customer's needs. Adaptation directly determines the success or failure of the final upper-level (customer) products.

 

In this way, the description is a little abstract. If the characteristics of adaptation work are divided into several classes based on the timeline, they can be divided into the following elements: precise positioning of delivery; stability and ease of use of delivery; delivery scalability; post-delivery upgrade; post-delivery service.

Classification is just to express what needs to be done, and in actual operation, these elements do not have clear logical boundaries between each other-different organizations may take completely different measures, however, no matter how the operation is performed, only these "adaptation work" can achieve good delivery results.

(1) Precise delivery positioning: it is equivalent to the platform feature positioning; it is not necessary to say that this is something that needs to be determined long before delivery occurs.

Take a car for example: the delivery must be required by the market. For example, if a customer needs a Volkswagen, you deliver a Toyota. Or the customer needs Passat, you delivered a theme. Therefore, no matter how hard the manufacturer has spent, the delivery is basically junk from the customer's point of view. This will test the platform merchants' forward-looking insights on market demand: the domestic market is changing rapidly, and some product features need to be laid out six months to one year ahead of schedule. In addition, sometimes platform vendors can even "guide market demands ".

 

(2) stability and ease of use of delivery; take the MTK's Turn-key as an example:

Before the MTK's Turn-key appeared, the common model was that platform vendors pushed a "semi-finished product" to the customer, and the customer was stable for several months, several more months of productization-if there is a chip-related yield problem during the productization process, the project will basically go down. So some people joked at that time: if a customer uses a platform provider's non-mass-production film, it will be dubbed "White Mouse "..

 

MTK's turn-key, which performs a lot of tests (from chips, to software, hardware, applications, and product-level tests) Before delivery-through strict quality control, simplify the complicated situation, and solve all the problems that most "white mice" encounter-this is the core competitiveness of China's great success. Customers only need to care about final productization. Although it is at the cost of some "differentiation", the customer does save resources and shorten the development cycle.

 

 

(3) scalability of delivery

For example, the customer requirements of the Volkswagen department are not only one (for example, Customer A wants to provide security, Customer B wants Polo, and customer C wants Passat ..), Each customer's needs are also diversified (for example, if customer A wants to change the non-sound gun, Customer B wants to change the non-skid tire, and customer C wants to start without A key ..);

The market team should first understand the typical requirements of the customer group, and determine with the RD team what to do and what to give up; RD should ensure the software and hardware architecture, reserved software and hardware interfaces provide sufficient degrees of freedom for cropping/scaling;

 

(4) Delivery upgrade

Your delivery cannot be a hammer sale. You must consider software upgrades, hardware upgrades, or even platform upgrades. On the one hand, you must extend the product cycle and increase the customer's viscosity. This of course also has a lot to do with the definition of the previous products. There must be a good plan in advance for those things to do first and what to do later.

Upgrade is not a patch-based upgrade, but a functional upgrade-you also need to buy a patch + new function and upgrade it one by one. The customer is most annoyed with this patch-based upgrade, can be avoided, can be avoided, and less;

The upgrade cannot be a frequent hardware change. This is a disaster for customers.

For example, MT6575-> MT6577 is a model of software and hardware upgrade.

Software upgrades, rational version management, and release processes are the key to avoiding catastrophic events. Strict tests are the means to avoid sacrificing stability and quality in exchange for time.

 

For those who are familiar with the development process and version management, we can see how deep the water is in (2) (3) (4 ..

 

(5) post-delivery services. It should be said that the typical Turn-key service is for Chinese customers-domestic customers who are used to the Turn-key feature:

Projects are very tight and under great pressure. project organization and management are generally loose, and engineers are very busy. Several projects are often shoulder-to-shoulder, so they are impatient to read documents and prefer direct on-site guidance .. Therefore, services become important. The purpose of the service is to help end users solve problems quickly. It is the last mile of fiber-optic access, which directly determines the customer experience.

 

However, relying too much on platform vendors is detrimental to the cultivation of individual customer capabilities and the growth of R & D organizations. However, in today's big environment, the fastest way to solve problems is to find support. Otherwise, the boss will give your face and you will not have time to exercise yourself. This is a reality .. In this situation, we may maintain a certain self-learning mechanism. It can only be a large company, because we can invest a little more human resources and tolerate a waste of time.

 

 

Postscript: I saw some comments from some netizens in my previous blog post, which is also one of my original intentions in this article. Turning-key does not mean copying and paste delivery by others, rather than calling engineers to build several mobile phones. Instead, it is increasingly a system project that tests the overall layout of the entire company, it needs to rise to the level of strategic decision-making. Why? Because the complete turn-key needs to mobilize various resources throughout the entire product chain, and must be integrated with the organizational structure and individual actions to ensure long-term success. The MTK is already unique here, and Qualcomm QRD is still struggling here. Zhan Xun is said to have been criticized by customers too frequently and repeatedly. Other companies are either engaged in a casual manner or in the original copy
And paste.

 

Looking at the current mobile phone industry, it is already a typical consumer electronics market. From a purely technical point of view, the IP Interconnection Bus standardization, powerful integrated tools, DFT provides mature validationprocess, all of which make the IC design closer and closer to the standard design. We no longer simply compete for hardware or software R & D capabilities, but for comprehensive strength-the most important thing in the overall strength is the software and hardware integration capabilities.

It is no longer difficult to make a technology-leading solution. What is more difficult is to quickly turn the solution into productivity. Anyone who can improve TTM will pay for it. Technology is still the cornerstone, but time, only now is the king !!