Post a CommentREDO: Spanish Meeting of Optical Designers
On October 6th, 2011 researchers from Indo Lens Group attended the 1st Meeting of Spanish Optical Designers (REDO) organized by the SECPhO (Southern European Cluster in Optics and Photonics) and Kidger Optics. The meeting was held in the CeDInt facilities, located in the campus of the Polytechnic University of Madrid.
In the meeting, many research results were presented, both public and private entities, all related to different applications in various fields of optics. Indo presented in poster format, the optic principles of the innovative progressive lens called “Maxima”, that is the first commercial output form the work developed in the FP7 project Made4U. (see www.made4U.info).
Indo’s R&D researchers that presented the poster related to the optic principles of the lens “Maxima”. From left to right: Ing. Javier Vegas, PhD Sara Chamadoira and Dr. Manel Espínola
Maxima lenses caused a great interest among the attendees. This innovative lens design takes advantage of the frame contour to optimize the lens thickness and optical performance to an unprecedented improvement of lateral vision field thanks to a reduction of 40% of the lens aberrations as can be seen in the picture below:
maxima lens and right conventional progressive lens of equal dioptric power
This innovative lens was recently awarded with the nomination to the “Silmo d’Or 2011” in the lens category.
The Benefits of Personalization
For a long time many industries supplied market solutions adapted to customers’s particular needs. The automobile industry is one of the most widespread examples. Personal computers is another. This product re-featuring to end-user specifications is known as mass customization. It is based on a number of discrete product functions and features required by buyers during the sales process. Manufacturing production lines and their respective automated planning and control systems have been designed to provide such solutions in many product offerings around the world. The times of Ford’s T-model for which you could “choose any color for your car as long as it was black”, are gone for good.
However, product personalization goes one significant step beyond mass customization. Here, subsequent production lines will need to support the manufacturing of products personalized to end user specifications in all their aspects. That is to say, products only made for and uniquely usable by their individual buyers. Such are exclusively ‘personal’ items. In the ophthalmics industry this type of personalization is still very rare. Until recently, similar products were only feasible in small production volumes, and were (are) mainly manufactured by craftsmen using tools and manual labor. There are a few known initiatives, where spectacle frames are ‘manually’ personalized to the bearer’s face morphology. However, no production lines are yet known, whereby fully personalized spectacles (frames, lens geometry and treatments) are created with minimal human intervention, and in larger, economically viable, and commercially attractive output production volumes. Notwithstanding, automated production of personalized spectacles in potentially more significant volumes appears quite feasible today, following the work done in the EC funded project Made4U, in which we developed the necessary technologies and systems in support of this objective.
But one should still raise the question: Why should personalization of spectacles be of any interest to end users, and what are the selling arguments about the added value these new niche and probably pricey products might offer? In the following we shall answer these questions based on our own project experiences to-date.
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Made4U Personalization: A new shopping experience
Personalization has been central to the concept of Made4U since the inception of the project four years ago. It was stated from the beginning that Made4U was not about mass customization, where customers could pick and choose a number of standard options to accommodate their personal needs and wishes. In other words, it wasn’t meant to be like configuring a desktop computer online, or like buying a brand new automobile with extras selected from a features catalogue. Made4U spectacles were conceived to be unique objects belonging to (and used by) single individuals, whose anthropometric facial characteristics and corrective vision prescriptions would become the determinant design factors.
It has been equally obvious at the outset that personalized spectacles would have to be initially sold to a distinguished and ‘brand-name’ aware public as niche, high value products. Customers should be attracted to these objects by their quality merits in the first place, but, at the same time, also by the novelty of the new experience during the ‘user co-design” phase. Like having dinner at a high-class restaurant, user experience could not only be left to rely upon the taste and uniqueness of available meals, but equally so upon their presentation on the dish and appropriate silverware used, as well as the whole entourage of waiters, reception, sitting, waiting and serving routines, and, last but not least, the superior atmosphere of the venue premises. In fact, it is all about real and perceived value for money that customers will eventually pay to receive.
It is therefore desirable to conceive the entire buying process of Made4U spectacles as a rather fresh, modern, high-tech, and greatly valued buying experience, somehow comparable to the sale of Apple Inc. products via their own dedicated stores available in the US and elsewhere. Apple’s stylish, innovative, high profile electronic devices are successfully sold at these minimalistic design stores albeit quite functional and user-friendly, where armies of employees (so-called geniuses) are available to patiently serve customers with answers to questions and other assistance.
The New Sales Store concept
Conform such intentions and purposes, Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (IBV), the Made4U Work Package
2 leader, has developed a new concept of the Made4U “Sales Store”. The new concept will yield an original buying experience for customers, whereby the end-user becomes the co-designer, and therefore he/she actively participates in the frame production process. Via end-user participation, the sales process of eyewear objects, being in fact products, will ultimately turn into the rendering of rather exclusive services. It is also expected that customers, who have been involved in the design process as much, will typically develop a tight ‘emotional connection’ to their personalized eyewear.
IBV distinguishes six phases in the new store concept: Online pre-selection, in-store welcome, selection, user measurements, sensory evaluation, and product delivery.
1. Online Preselection
Customers will typically visit a Made4U certified optician’s webpage to preselect online a few frame designs. Registration of user profile data will allow linking customers to those preselected frames that can be shown to them during a visit to the store at a later moment. Explanatory information and multimedia showcases about frame designs should accompany their online display; as an example, user-friendly and rich content could be provided about end-user physiognomies that would ideally fit various frame shapes (per the general rules of the Tipheret Optomorphism ® method).
2. In-store Welcome
In-store welcome could materialize via customer interaction with a human agent (optician) or a variety of virtual advisors (avatars). Both, agents and avatars, will guide customers in every step of the frame selection process. During this phase, customers should be able to spend as much time necessary, and should be allowed to wonder around the shop and try-on various frames before arriving at a few preferred shortlisted designs.
3. Selection
In this stage, the customer’s face is scanned with specialized scanning equipment (anthropometric measurements) and the scanned images are virtually reproduced on a monitor. Based on the image display, a co-design software system provides hints and aesthetic suitability advice about the selected frame designs. Online simulations with those frames superimposed upon virtual representations of a user’s head and face may be also displayed – a sort of virtual try-on. In such online simulations, try-on virtual frames (fast rendered 3D models) may be further adapted to a user’s personal preferences (shape, colour, decoration, etc.)
4. User measurements
Optometric measurements to define corrective prescriptions are taken during this phase. In fact, a user’s aesthetic measurements (phase 3) are kept consciously separate from his/her optometric measurements (correction prescriptions). One reason may be the fact that, as a matter of practice in many countries, quite a few customers visit and receive their corrective prescriptions from ophthalmologists.
5. Sensory Evaluation
In this final co-design phase, users are left alone to make definitive decisions. In online monitors they visualize themselves in various contexts, situations, facial expressions, etc., and they can further try on more virtual variants of their selected frames. They can even share their impressions in real time with family and friends via the Internet, and can see, touch, and feel real samples of their frames of choice to better appreciate their physical and material properties (colour, surface, weight, flexibility, rigidness, etc.)
6. Product Delivery
Customers would naturally prefer to have their spectacles delivered to them very soon after the buying co-design process. It might be realistic to assume that in the not too distant future improved laser sintering equipment with much faster manufacturing speeds than today’s practice will start appearing at opticians’ shops as personalized frame cutters. Fast delivery of new pairs of Made4U spectacles could then become a reality. In the meantime however, and for all sorts of supply chain economics related to the inefficiencies and costs of manufacturing lines, the production of personalized spectacles may be expected to occur within delivery times rather ‘typical’ for the rest of the industry.
Innovative Business Modeling Techniques
As much as Made4U is about inventing and refining innovative technologies to render possible commercially viable value chains that will produce personalized spectacles (frames, lenses, incl. treatment and tinting), it is very much focused into testing innovative bring-to-market business models. The first work package of our work is devoted to analyzing planned phases and value chain activities from a cost structure viewpoint based on an approach known as "Value-Added Stack". However, this is only part of the modeling story.
Dr. Alexander Osterwalder, EPFL (Lausanne), has recently launched a generic template that can be readily used to create comprehensive and holistic business models. This template Osterwalder calls the Canvas. Such an approach guides businessmen and product strategists in their formulation of the necessary elements that will constitute their bring-to-market business models. Via the Canvas one seeks answers to a number of questions, grouped in two sets. The Demand set, addressing the customer facing aspects of the model and the Supply set, concerned with the resourcing and production aspects of the model:
DEMAND:
1. What is our value proposition (what is our offer and how is it different from competitive offers)?
2. Who is our customer (define targeted market segments)?
3. How do we connect with our customers (customer relationship aspects)?
4. How do we reach our customers with our products (the sales and delivery lifecycle channels)?
5. How do we make money in this process (revenue streams)?
SUPPLY:
6. Which are our Key Activities (platform maintenance, production lines, etc...)?
7. Which are our Key Resources (Intellectual, human, physical assets, brand,...)?
8. Who are our Key Partners in all this?
9. What is our cost structure (so that profits can emerge from the operation)?
As mentioned earlier, the tasks under point 9 above are analyzed in extended detail in WP1. On the other hand, based on the conclusions and recommendations of WP1, the Work Package for Dissemination and Exploitation (WP8) will focus on the remaining aspects of the Osterwalder Canvas for the Made4U consortium to complete the business modeling work needed to accompany the project Plan for Use and Dissemination of Knowledge.
For additional detail on this approach feel free to download and read the PDF presentation provided in our downloads section.