Jim Shaw, EVP of Engineering at Crystal Group, discusses the importance of product innovation and continuous product improvement.
Video Transcript: Episode 58 – “Innovation & Customer Feedback”
Hi, Jim Shaw here from Crystal Group, wanted to spend a moment and just talk a little bit about product innovation and continuous process or product improvement.
And one of the things that we do is we, we listen a lot to the customers. And that’s kind of important when you’re buying servers from a supplier, make sure that they listen. One of the comments that we had is the customers wanted to be able to label their drives. They wanted to be able to essentially number them or put their logo on them and so we redesigned the front carrier or the front sled of our drives so that they had this handle on them and it’s essentially a unique design to Crystal Group and that we’ve created an area for the unit to be labeled or numbered or we could put a logo on.
And it’s extremely robust I think you could run over it with a tank and it would essentially have no problems. The improvements that we’ve also included are the large size thumb screws for these units so that they are easier to get in and out of the system for tool-less applications you can just do it with your fingers. So those are some of the things that we’re constantly working on, listening to the customer trying to figure out what better mouse trap that we can create to better solve a customer’s problems. In the end, what we’re trying to do is just make sure that we solve the customer’s problems more effectively and so we’re always listening very intently to what the customer has to say and then trying to figure out how can we solve the problem for them more effectively.
Thanks.