Understanding customer challenges leads your innovation

BUILDING a South African business to compete in the high-end technical product market is no mean feat.

You are up against companies in locations that have access to high-end technical skills, proximity to markets, reputation and nation status: buy American for example.

Crafting and delivering on a value proposition that wins business every time needs a deep understanding of who your customers are and how they buy your products.

Poynting Antennas, a tight, technically sharp outfit that specializes in antenna development, exemplifies this. It understands that the antenna is often the last piece of equipment to be purchased on a vehicle that has been in production for many months. The cost of holding that vehicle on the production floor creates an urgency from clients on antenna design and supply.

Design options, speed of production and quality are the watchwords that win this business making up Poynting’s value proposition today.

The implications for suppliers wishing to enter into Poynting’s supply chain are severe. Working internationally, requests for Poynting’s products match a 24/7 tempo from clients in 57 countries.

Crunchyard, an outsourced data crunching and visualisation business, understood this. Providing an outsourced supercomputing processing capability allowed Poynting to "crunch" the data on multiple antenna designs in hours as opposed to days.

By providing multiple data visualisation packages and technical competence in building and supporting supercomputing processing capabilities, Poynting’s operating costs were reduced.

Finally, by offering the service through an easy-to-use web-enabled front end, any Poynting engineer can access the service anytime, anywhere.

The collaboration between supplier and buyer in relation to the buyer’s customer demands demonstrated in this feature of The Growth Engines is what allowed CrunchYard to develop a service to help Poynting win business.

How did this happen?

Collaboration, trust and respect, increasingly rare attributes between suppliers and customers today!

Focused big business players will outsource services to entrepreneurial small business suppliers in instances such as this, enjoying an increased agility and lower cost of business.

As the clutter is cleared away through a collaborative effort, innovation takes its place, a natural outcome of a focused, customer driven business.

These qualities are aptly demonstrated in both Poynting and CrunchYard.