Ideas about robots and the voice of the customer
Lars Agerlin, vice president of research and development, points to growth in UR’s product creation teams as a clear example of its customer-focused approach. “To bring the voice of the customer into our product development process, we reorganized our team to create ‘empowered product teams,’” Lars explains. This team digs deep into customer challenges to develop clear connections between the problems the customer needs to solve and the best way to do it. “As part of that, our engineering team continues to talk to customers throughout the development process, showing them the steps and getting feedback,” adds Lars.
The following example comes from UR Innovation Labs and is endorsed by UR president Kim Povlsen. Last year, the product innovation team worked with customers to scrutinize a group of related market segments with similar ‘clear’ needs in the use of robotics, from the removal of contamination out of the robot to make automated robots that can be thoroughly cleaned for production environments with particularly stringent requirements such as food, pharmaceutical, medical and semiconductor manufacturers. By focusing on customer problems, they had a robot idea within six months. But customer input doesn’t end there. The robot concept was showcased at both the Automate (US) and Analytica (Germany) trade shows in 2022, a new and highly visible approach to co-development, generating feedback Great for product teams.
If you want to know more, listen to Kasper Kreiberg Andersen, director of innovation programs at UR, discuss how to approach this new robotics idea in the roundtable “Redefining Automation Technology” ours.
“We brought this robot idea to these major international exhibitions to get faster responses from interested customers, and we were not disappointed,” said Lars. “We received immediate and diverse feedback from dozens of customers not only in those expected industries but also from others, few of which we did not expect. Some of these are potential customers eager to explain why they want to use cobots but can’t – and what we can do to fix that.”
Lars explains the importance of this approach for UR’s new agile processes. “We need to be able to adapt as we go, changing plans based on data or feedback as we receive it,” Lars adds. “In the waterfall development model, we come up with requirements and spend two years tracking them. Now we’re running parallel with our requirements so we can continuously release products and updates that suit our customers’ needs. We cannot simply create a one-size-fits-all autonomous robot, collaborative robot, or robotic hand. Now it is no longer an obstacle for us.”
