Q 645. What is Reverse Engineering? What are the various methods in which it support the business excellence strategy of an organization? Provide examples to support your answer.

 

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Reverse Engineering is a process of reconstructing a product to understand how this was built and its functions. It is also a process to fix and recreate to a more enhanced product.

 

Below are just the two of the many ways Reverse Engineering can support business excellence strategy.

1. Explore competitors existing products: This will help the organization to understand the competitor's products as well as processes that will help identify process improvement ideas for the advancement of their own product development strategies. Understanding how the competitor's manufactures their product, reverse engineering can build a cheaper alternative solution. 

2. Enhance existing product and processes: Through reverse engineering, organization can identify inefficiencies, flaws and areas of optimization that can lead to revenue growth and increased customer satisfaction.

Failure Analysis: Reconstructing a faulty product will identify the reason behind unsuccessful product. 

Example:

Apple may reverse engineer Android phones to understand product features. The findings can help Apple develop a better product that will exceeds the features of the Android phone or develop a mobile phone that will exceed the customers' expectations. They can also, identify flaws and fix them before they reach the market.

It’s a process in which machines or structures are deconstructed or dismantled to extract design information from them.The reverse engineering process enables us to determine how a part was designed so that we can recreate it. Many things can be reverse engineered like software machines, aircrafts, any architectural structures, measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3D model. The reverse engineering is named as such because it involves working backward through the original design process.

Reverse engineering supports business excellence in various ways. Some of them are:

1.Enhancement of the product:

by deconstructing the products the organisation can easily evaluate the positive and negative aspects leading to the development of the product in their own perspective.

2.Market Analysis:

By reverse engineering competitor’s product, organisations can acquire insights into customer preferences, emerging technologies and market trends.By reverse engineering organisations can develop product using strategic positioning systems.

3.Parts improvement:

Reverse engineering is also used for parts improvement.You may need to alter a component after conducting a failure analysis.If no replacement or alternative part is available you can have the part reverse engineered to create a copy of the original design.

 

Example:

A small company that has been in business for over 30 years might have manufactured no of products before the days of computer aided design and digital file storage. As a result these older products may be based on paper blue prints.By reverse engineering this company can regain their lost design and create archieves of the product.They can create a digital version of the paper blue prints.

 

 

 

 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.

Reverse Engineering:

 

Reverse Engineering is also called as Back engineering. It is the process of learning / extracting design information by deconstructing a Product which may be a Machine, software, technology, Biological function, etc.,

 

I would like to quote two main areas in which Reverse Engineering is more beneficial. They are Product Improvement and Cost Reduction.

 

Product Improvement:

 

Reverse Engineering helps companies to analyze it’s competitors products for understanding their features, the types of materials used and the way the product is manufactured. By learning this, the company can understand their rival products and use the learnings to improve the Quality or Efficiency of their Products.

Example: In the booming E Vehicle industry, Tesla analyses battery technology of the traditional EV makers to understand their Design, Performance and Manufacturing process through which they will identify opportunities to improve the efficiency of Tesla batteries

 

Cost Reduction:

 

Reverse Engineering helps businesses to analyze their own Process (Manufacturing process / Supply chains). This can be achieved by analyzing their existing Process or systems in which they can find ways to streamline operations, identify and reduce different types of wastes and cut costs.

Example: A software company examines it’s own Software Development Life Cycle process which includes Requirement gathering, Design, Coding, Testing and Deployment. By Reverse Engineering their own process, they identifies that there were process inefficiencies such as Long Feedback loops, redundant documentation, etc., By fixing these inefficiencies, the Software company can save costs.

 

The other areas where Reverse Engineering is successfully used are: Forensics & Investigations, Legacy System Mitigation, Intellectual Property protection, etc.,

Good attempt at answering this question by all respondents. The best answer is given by Jay. Well done!