THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW LCD PROJECTOR

 An LCD projector is a type of video projector for displaying video, images or computer data on a screen or other flat surface. In today's technology driven world, we need to move faster just to get a step ahead. Even projectors, first developed as PC presentation tools have expanded beyond its original purpose. Now, with its innovative capabilities it has become essential equipment for business to education to home entertainment.

At SmartSolutions, our targeted generation of projectors is not only powerfully impaction but beautifully compact as well. With amazing image quality, user-friendly functions and now automatic operability, they will become the perfect tool for professional presentations at work and entertaining movie screenings at home. What's more, with our relentless R&D pursuits, we are constantly striving to create new technologies to serve new markets through innovative product development. All these, so customers have the power to present the sharpest and clearest images every time, be it to a crowd of audience in a hall, during a board meeting or to a classroom full of students.

 Substantial growth is predicted in the upcoming years for LCD projectors, including business projectors, home projectors and projection systems for large-screen LCD projection televisions. By zeroing in on these three markets, SmartSolutions Sdn. Bhd. seeks to extend its reach in the market for digital entertainment. Many small- and medium-sized businesses, schools, and other organizations still use outmoded overhead projectors.

Annual Units Sold

Replacement of these (business projectors, home projectors and educational purpose projector) is expected to fuel annual unit volume growth of more than 20% for business projectors. Because of this, SmartSolutions Sdn. Bhd is planning to expand the business projection market by offering competitive product prices. SmartSolutions Sdn. Bhd developing an industry production technology and R&D structure that will further distinguishes it from competitors.  SmartSolutions Sdn. Bhd is trying to focus the production in domestic market and enacting other initiatives in pursuit of even lower production costs.

In the 2008 and 2009 surveys, live TV and video combined were predicted to be the largest application in 2012 or 2013 by a considerable margin, but in the 2010 survey viewing photographs and presentations were expected to be nearly as important as TV/video by 2014. Pacific Media Associates (PMA), the worldwide market information experts on front projectors, has released the first findings from their just-completed annual survey, in which the manufacturers of projectors, optical engines, and components predicted that the worldwide market for projectors will reach 22 million units by 2014, up from about 700,000 units in 2010.

According to the statistic, we expect the annual units sold could reach 100,000 units for the first year of production. Meaning that, in average, almost 8300 unit sold in every month. It may seem a low number of production and sales compared to the other established brands such Epson, Sony and Dell. However, this estimation is reasonable due to customer recognition of a new brand and feedback from customers.

Development Time 

            For the development time of LCD projector production, SmartSolutions Sdn. Bhd. requires a lot of time in R&D due to lack of experience, technologies and man power. For the earlier production stage, we decided to invite local manufacturers who make components (e.g., imager chips or illumination systems) in order to reduce the production time.

            After the products are well established in the market, company targeting to maximize the utilization of capacity production by handling and assemble the products. In the development time aspect, the most time consumed during R&D. This stage consists of components evaluation in term of their durability, prices and quality. Besides that, the evaluation of market condition must be considered in order to ensure our product could be competitive in the market. After considering all the factors, our estimated development time for the production of new LCD projector is about 6 to 12 month before launching to the mainstream.

Size of Development Team 

            LCD projector production is generally developed in many phases. First, in pre-production, pitches, prototypes, and projector design documents are written. If the idea is approved and the developer receives funding, a full-scale development begins. This usually involves a 20–100 man team of various responsibilities, such as designers, artists, programmers, testers, etc. The projector productions go through development stages until finally being released. New LCD projector are advertised, marketed, and showcased at related carnival promotion.

            For the size of development team, we estimate 24-person involved in the project. Then, they will be divided into 3 small teams, making sure there was a developer, tester, customer/requirements person, writer, some sort of project-manager-type person on each team, and add however many other developers and testers the team thought they needed. We choose to have many testers because there are so many possibilities of boards, OS’s, firmware versions, and some software, that even with combinatorial testing approaches, the fact that they felt they needed to boot all the way each test meant no test could take fewer than 5 minutes. That means a given tester is limited in the number of experiments he/she can do. If they had more time, maybe they wouldn’t need as many testers, and the developers would have to do more testing.

Development Cost

            Development cost is the sum of costs of all resources consumed in the process of making a product. The development cost is classified into three categories: direct materials cost, direct labor cost and manufacturing overhead.

Direct materials are the raw materials that become a part of the finished product. Manufacturing adds value to raw materials by applying a chain of operations to maintain a deliverable product. There are many operations that can be applied to raw materials such cutting and painting. It is important to differentiate between the direct materials and indirect materials.

The direct labor cost is the cost of workers who can be easily identified with the unit of production. Types of labor who are considered to be part of the direct labor cost are the assembly workers on an assembly line. Manufacturing overhead is any manufacturing cost that is neither direct materials cost nor direct labor cost. Manufacturing overhead includes all charges that provide support to manufacturing. Our estimated cost after considering all those factors is about RM1million to RM2 million.