Reverse engineering or Backward engineering is the process of analyzing a product or a device's details to understand its design, function, and performance characteristics by a structured method of dismantling, dissecting, inspecting, and studying the inner profile/structure of the product.
Organizations invest in the exercise of reverse engineering with the sheer goal viz. to identify the scope of improvement in an existing product’s value and create a better version of it.
Reverse engineering supports the business excellence strategy of an organization in the following ways:
a.) Innovation: Insights derived from reverse engineering enable organizations to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their existing product or competitor’s offering. These insights will become inputs for designers or engineers to improve the existing weaknesses through innovation and create a better offering for the customer.
For example: Tesla has reverse-engineered multiple competitor cars to understand their overall architecture, one of them was the BMW i3 which was a market leader in terms of battery technology. This helped Tesla to improve their electric car’s performance and overall efficiency.
b.) Cost reduction: Any/every product is the result of the transformation of a raw material to a finished good through various manufacturing processes. Through reverse engineering, one can backtrack all the steps performed to produce that product. Thus, helps in cost reduction by simplifying the production process, optimizing raw material cost, resource deployment, time to deliver, etc.
For example: Mobile manufacturers such as Oppo, and Vivo are constantly reverse engineering their competitor’s mobile devices viz. Samsung and Apple to understand its design, features, and production process. This exercise helps them to offer their product in the market with similar designs and features at reduced cost and gain maximum market share in the Indian market.
c.) Competitive edge: To stay ahead in the race and continue to be the product market leader companies around the world keep on analyzing their competitor’s products and build features and functions that help them to always have a competitive edge over their competitors.
For example: Nintendo a video game company continuously improves its software and gaming console by reverse engineering competitor’s gaming platforms and hardware architecture.
d.) New Product Development: Many times organizations get stuck in the development stage and it becomes very difficult for designers to bridge the gap between market requirement and their product offerings. By conducting reverse engineering on competitor products, designers and engineers can get influential insights that help them to continue and conclude the development cycle of a new product enabling rapid product launches.
For example: While designing a new aircraft model the Boeing design engineers reverse-engineered competitor’s components such as engines, airframes, avionics systems, etc. which helped them understand the design requirement as well as regulatory compliance. Thus, reverse engineering helped Boeing engineers reduce their development efforts.