Timing of New Product Rollouts

FIRST General Forum
1

Over the past month or so, we’ve seen mass product releases from Armabot, REV, AndyMark, VEX, and other COTS merchants. As anticipation for the upcoming 2019 season rises, these announcements help increase the excitement. However, there have been several side discussions about the timing of these releases being counterproductive; teams feel they are forced to make early decisions to purchase products that have not been field tested - and may not even make it on the final robot design - to ensure they will receive and critically evaluate these components sufficiently before bag day.

There are a couple of issues I see at hand here. First, the concerns from the community are absolutely valid - just as nobody likes to see a late Team Update from the GDC squash a robot concept that teams have been pursuing, nobody likes to see a new robot component fail due to lack of field testing or understanding of its functionality. I am confident all vendors put their products through rigorous testing before releasing the products to the public, but there’s no substitute for actual competition (and 14-year-old fingers).

Another issue is the rhythm of these vendors’ calendar years. I would presume that product research and development comes to a halt in January through April, as these vendors scramble to keep up with the demands of teams. Many of these vendors also support STEM programs other than FRC, whether it’s designing games, fields & elements, products, technical support, or mentorship throughout the year. I imagine it’s a bit of a scramble for them to get all their efforts ready for the November/December reveals, and making these products available earlier in the year might result in the products being underdeveloped, underevaluated, or obsolete by the time build season rolls around.

I’m sure there are many other factors at play that I’m not recognizing off the top of my head.

So, Vendors, take this opportunity not only to clear the air, but also, if you’re willing, to let your loyal customers have a peek into the rationale behind the timing of your product release. Trade secrets can and should stay secret, of course, but in the spirit of coopertition, transparency, and genuine customer interest & satisfaction, the floor is yours.

Customers, take this opportunity to let the vendors know the rhythms of your season. I’ve seen and heard a tremendous amount of team leaders say they won’t live on the bleeding edge, that they’ll let a product go through a competition year before considering putting that product on their robot. If products were released at a different time in the calendar year, when would you prefer? And, equally as importantly, at what point(s) in the year would the message be lost, due to other personal and professional commitments? In the spirit of discourse, customer needs, and expectations, the floor is yours.

2

From a customer point of view, the ideal time for new products to become available would be just after the World Championships. This would give teams half a year to try things out at offseason events and during summer/fall workshops, and would alleviate concerns about stock and shipping delays.

I can think of lots of reasons why that would not be preferable from the supplier side, though.

3

I agree right after champs would be best for teams, but fall release dates (even December) is fine… so long as the products are actually available. Those teams that want to go bleeding edge for the apparent benefits of a new product can choose to do so, those that are more cautious don’t lose anything. The problem teams run into is when products aren’t available. A supplier may release something magical in December, kickoff comes around a few weeks later and, the product being fresh in their minds, teams may think “oh, that’ll be perfect for our design!” So they design around said product, thinking “Jan 31 availability is fine, we can build and then just drop it in”. But then Jan 31 slips to Feb 10, 15, 20… teams panic and have to redesign because this magical new part didn’t actually come in stock in time to be used.

If something isn’t going to be available by kickoff, I’d prefer to not even know about it. Hold onto it for a few months and release it after champs, or do a mid-season release if you think it’s something teams would jump on for that years game. But please, don’t put teams in the position of designing around a product they may not actually get in time to use. It’s just adding one more risk to an already time-sensitive build season.

4

I’ll go one step further: I think it’d be a good idea to change the COTS rules to only allow items that are available prior to kickoff to count as COTS items.

This would not only incentivize better behavior on the part of the suppliers, but would fix the “purpose-built mechanisms for this year’s game” problem.

5

I’m not so cool with this. There are tons of reasons to not limit the definition of COTS to items available prior to kickoff, what happens if 2x1 tubing is available prior to kickoff but runs out in the first week of the season?

Further, some products become available mid season that aren’t even necessarily related to FRC at all, we just happen to use them. Not all vendors that teams use are in this tiny microcosm that we inhabit. I’d prefer we not limit mid-season upgrades to hardware.

6

The current rules around this are actually much stricter, just never enforced.

8.1.D: [VENDORS] “should maintain sufficient stock or production capability to fill Teams’ orders within a reasonable period during the season (less than 1 week).”

7

As an LRI, I don’t really want to be in the position of trying to enforce that. Can you really imagine it? “Oh, you used Vex’s flanged Thunderhex bearings? Those weren’t in stock for the first half of the build season, so they’re actually illegal. Go rebuild your entire robot now…” No thank you. I think that portion of the rules could stand to be examined and rewritten to recognize factors affecting global supply chains, suppliers ability to warehouse product, and the ability of inspectors to reasonably enforce the rules without completely ruining a team’s season. I doubt the rule was intended to prevent teams from using some of these “standard” parts we’ve grown accustomed to.

8

Certainly, I agree there would have to be some sort of exception written in for “standard” products that have been available for some time but periodically go in and out of stock.

9

I suspect it was written to prevent well-intentioned entrepreneurial teams from classifying themselves as vendors.

10

I agree with all of the above, however the inconvenience of not fully vetting a product is not as bad as not being able to purchase a product after kick off because every team wants the same part.

Hex bearings, wheels, VP gear sets etc… how many times we created a design in week two only to realize that we are 4 items short and cant get them until week 5 because they are back ordered.

My wish would be vendors do a better job of planing and maintain stock especially on the common parts. I realize that not always the most profitable. Perhaps the vendors can sign an ND agreement to view the game pre-kickoff so they can get an idea of what products will be in demand.

11

As I see it, this is really a set of a handful of interconnected issues.
1 - Product announcements with insufficient time to evaluate prior to build season
2 - Product (re)stocking dates near or after kickoff
3 - Product stocking quantities being insufficient to meet demand
4 - Products designed specifically for the game challenge
5 - Implications of a “no bag” schedule on FRC supplier announcement and stocking strategies in 2020 and beyond

From my teams’ perspective, ever since the tan Jaguars, we’ve largely sidestepped issue 1 by simply refusing to be early adopters of most products. It works fine for us, but is suboptimal in the long run. Personally, I would very much love for new products to be announced/available to teams roughly around the start of the school year (September), so we can purchase and evaluate them during the fall (preferably at off-season events).

Issue 2 has been rougher, and is seemingly getting worse each year. We used to like to place pre-season orders in the November timeframe, giving us plenty of time to prepare for build season. Now, we’re forced to wait until the verge of build season or beyond for some items that we depend on. This has compounded with the fact that COTS vendors have built their own ecosystems of parts that interact, so chosing to move away from a product line that we have years of investment in is not an easy or cheap decision to make.

Issue 3’s impact on 1712 has varied on a year-to-year basis. We used to have a much smaller budget, which resulted in many more “as needed” purchases as opposed to stocking up on components. This made it really tough when products we hoped to acquire were sold out during build season (and this is a large part of the reason we held out on adopting the hex shaft system for such a long time compared to other teams). Even as we shifted to a larger budget and being able to maintain a healthy inventory of more items, various specialty components selling out have impacted us (pneumatic wheels/tires in 2016, field springs in 2017, compliant wheels in 2018) to varying degrees.

Issue 4 hasn’t directly impacted 1712 to this point, but is more of a philosophical question to begin with. It’s been hashed over in places like the threads on the Greyt product line and the 2016 WCP MCC. I will mention that it does have some pretty interesting connections to issue 5, and may fundamentally change after the elimination of bag day.

Issue 5 is something that’s going to upend the status quo for all of this. Does the lack of bag day make it more acceptable for suppliers to stock items in mid-January or later? How much further does it open up the window to purpose-built COTS mechanisms? To COTS mechanisms built intentionally to mimic released designs? To in-season revisions of existing products?

For the purposes of preventing purpose-built mechanisms, I support a variation of this rule. Rather tha only allowing items that are “available” prior to kickoff, only allow items that are “announced” prior to kickoff.

12

This would make it impossible to use sensors and devices from some vendors like TI, Analog Devices/Linear, Intel, and a host of others that have release cycles that don’t correspond in any way to the FRC build season. Some of these don’t get announced prior to release or they are announced in obscure presentations at conferences that only a few have heard of or even attend/watch.

I realize we’re in a minority of teams that might play with this stuff but it seems silly to limit teams to items that are announced prior to the start of the season when something awesome could come along from a vendor who has no clue about FRC and suddenly you’ve made it more difficult to engage them as a future sponsor.

As for purpose-built mechanisms - I welcome the day that I can click “buy it now” from an early iteration of 319’s already-open designs and have it show up at our lab within a week. We’re a couple API calls away from it as it is… Some folks are so opposed to a vendor releasing items to accelerate a team to being competitive that they aren’t paying attention to how the entire manufacturing world is changing.

13

I have a slightly different proposal, as I’m not sure it would be in the rules necessarily, rather FIRST’s guidelines for making the rules.

For an item to be specifically called out as legal in the rules for year n, the item MUST be publicly available to any team by October of year n-1.

14

I know that most teams aren’t affected by this problem, but the late-offseason product releases are a big problem for international teams. We have to place our orders about a month and a half early for anything we want to have for kickoff in order not to pay an arm and a leg for shipping.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, like most teams, we don’t have a chance to test the new products before the season. For the parts that are available within a few days of being announced, if we want them by kickoff we have to pay for a second expedited shipment, which can sometimes be more expensive than the parts themselves. And since we don’t know which parts will be announced beforehand when we place our first orders, we sometimes don’t have the budget to order the new parts because we already spent it on other similar parts. For example, this offseason we bought about 40 775pros with 32dp pinions. I’d love to be able to buy some new Redline-a’s and 20dp 775 pinions to play around with, but we already spent that money on the regular 775pros.

For these reasons, my general thinking is that we can’t use parts announced for this season until next season. This also allows us to let other teams do the competition-testing so we know the product’s limits before we break them. I would also love to see the product releases moved to May-ish so we get the whole summer to order, ship, and test the products before using them in-season. But of course that’s probably not feasible for the vendors.

16

Everyone is bringing up some great points and I agree with many of them from a consumer point of view.

Here at Armabot we were mostly mimicking the other vendors and throwing out our once a year new product post with the others. We could have released some items earlier but didn’t feel the need to.

For the generic business aspect, I’ll throw out some possibilities on why we’re seeing the winter timing of releases. I’m not accusing any suppliers of taking advantage of the following list, much of this could be just results of the timing of build season.

  1. Product life cycle. Assuming an aggressive development cycle of 6-8 months, the winter is a very logical release time. If you were to purposely postpone a season, you would lose an entire year worth of revenue on that concept. With product life cycles being limited, assume 5 years that would be around 20 percent lost revenue. Maybe you could argue that releasing later would push the life cycle back, but that’s assuming competitors would not be entering the market to displace your product.

  2. Competition. For a business to business competitive standpoint, winter is safe time to launch products. I’m fairly certain that all the FRC suppliers have major slumps in the Summer / Early fall time period. I’m guessing many teams with limited budgets have a “buy it if you need it during the build season, and play with it if you have it in the summer”. The suppliers need to make a business decision on the risk/reward of releasing a product in the summer. On the one hand you’ll get some sales, and teams would get familiar with your product, but on the other hand you give your competitors the chance to make a competing product. This could mean ½ the sales or worse if they make improvements that really displace your product for that initial season that you could have had 100% market share because you were the originator and released in the winter. Normal business has some protections for this, but I don’t believe they scale to the high school competitive robotics industry.

  3. Team stockpiling and panic buying. Teams needing or having the feeling they need to stock everything in anticipation of products being out of stock and not being competitive during the season. This might not have a lot to do with winter releases, but I believe it’s a reality for many teams with budgets that can support it.

  4. Voucher traffic. Many teams start off the shopping season by going to the voucher links, and many others through the KoP coupon book after kickoff. Suppliers want to have their items ready for this boost in traffic which happens in the winter.

As with many things consumer action can make businesses react and change their business model. If I knew that in the month of June Armabot would have the majority of our sales for the year, I would totally change our development / release cycle to correspond to that demand.

17

I really like this. I think it could help the manufacturer’s side to do what they do with the VRC games - announce products around champs with a date to product release several months later. Let people know what’s coming without needing to get it to them in the next four weeks.

18

VEX’s response can be found here.

19

Many of the COTS suppliers are former/current participants of FRC teams and their largest/entire market are the FIRST programs.
Unlike popular companies such as McMaster who sells to a much larger market year round, I cant see how the timing could be fixed unless some fundamental shift in how FRC is delivered, changes.

20

I think I recall hearing in the past that FIRST presents game information to select suppliers around the October / November time frame (though I could be wrong). It’s no secret that game-specific products (or at least products that work better in the upcoming game than alternatives) are released most years during the December product releases, which only gives suppliers 1-2 months to design new products as well as stock what they think they’ll need based off the game info. Personally I prefer having these products and priority stocking based on game knowledge because I think the net effect is a benefit to teams, but 1-2 months makes that kind of work impossible unless the supplier has inside info from FIRST that the other primary suppliers do not.

I’m curious what’s stopping FIRST from telling these suppliers this game information in June, or July. Why not give them more time to plan around their stock (which takes quite some time to prepare and ship) and prepare their new products. I have a hard time believing that the game isn’t ready enough by then to give suppliers a basic outline of what to expect, and if it isn’t then FIRST should consider changing their game design process, because it really isn’t that hard.

21

I fail to see how this would make it impossible to use sensors from those companies. It simply means you’ll have to wait until next build season (or really just that year’s offseason events) to use those sensors. If a product isn’t released until March or April of a year, are you really going to rush to get it onto your competition bot anyway? So it’s really only impacting any products released in January or February, and then it’s only delaying their use by one year.

And I don’t see how it impacts recruiting them as sponsors in the slightest. Heck, Analog Devices currently is a FIRST Choice vendor and Texas Instruments used to provide items in the KoP.