| LX Group
LX Group |
| LX Group REAL VALUE
LX Group | LX is one of the leading product design consultancies in the world. They utilise their knowledge, experience and resources in order to provide a high-quality, comprehensive and efficient product development solution to clients in Australia and around the globe. They offer a professional turnkey experience, with services designed to take a new product from idea through to production. Put simply, LX turns concepts into realities – and those concepts can be wide and varied. Over the years, LX has put their systematic approach and extensive knowledge to work on everything from consumer products such as alarm clocks to gaming keypads, industrial control products such as sensor based monitoring systems and automatic delivery systems, medical products such as heart monitors and cochlear implants, classified defence projects and much, much more. Since forming in 2006, LX has worked on more than 300 products and projects involving embedded systems and wireless technology. All of these projects have been innovative and cost-effective. Some have even been “market changing.”
| LX Group
LX Group | According to Simon Blyth, Managing Director of LX Group, the possibilities for their solutions are almost endless. If a device is wireless – or “internet-enabling,” in his words – LX can develop it. “If a client wants a new electronic product built, they come to us,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter what it is – whether it’s a device for a toothbrush, a device for a bike or helicopter, or a device for a hospital or factory. We can design and build it.” Over the last nine years, LX has become well recognised for their superior service and the “real value” they provide clients. Today, most of their work comes from word of mouth and referrals, and Simon says that customer satisfaction is a result of the group’s “strong capabilities.” LX has a high calibre, selectively-recruited engineering team with over 150 years of combined product development experience across a wide range of technologies and industries. They have the ability to quickly understand new electronic designs and projects whilst solving problems, managing risk and optimising cost. They also have proven project management experience and an awardwinning product portfolio to back it all up. “It’s not difficult in the electronic world to spend a lot of money and not get very far,” Si-
| LX Group mon says. “But we have developed a proven technology strategy, and we’ve built a very strong platform for future development. That makes us deliver solutions faster, better and at a lower-cost.” “We bring a lot of value to our clients and their projects, and that’s the key thing that sets us apart,” he adds. “If you can do that, it becomes easy to make people happy.” “Coming to us is a little bit like coming to an architect to design a house,” Simon says, describing the product development process from the beginning. “Except we’re the architect and the builder all in one.We provide a full range of services from concept generation, research and prototyping, through to volume manufacturing and onsite engineering contracting.” In the concept generation stage, Simon explains that LX can assist in exploring the opportunity, evaluating technology options and defining the solution. They consider the problem the client wants to solve, and they come up with an approach to solve it. FULL RANGE OF SERVICES
LX Group | “People don’t have to come to us knowing what they need to build,” Simon says. “They can come to us with a general high level problem and we can help them figure it out.” At the same time, LX is also highly flexible and can tailor their service to meet the client’s exact needs. Sometimes, for example, they work with large engineering organisations that have already done the conceptual work and come to LX with existing specifications. From there, LX takes the clients through every other stage of the development process. They select the parts and technologies, design the circuit boards, design the firmware and then design the cloud solution. When they have a prototype the client is satisfied with, LX can then provide testing, verification and certification services. LX also offers manufacturing services for both prototypes and volume production. They have in-house capabilities for PCB manufacture, SMT assembly and inspection, conformal coating and potting, and they also have strong relationships with manufacturing partners overseas who can work to a
| LX Group range of quality assurance certifications. Even after manufacturing, LX’s services often continue. Since many of their solutions come with a cloud-based component, Simon says the company sticks around to provide support on an ongoing basis whilst considering updated and upgraded versions. LX’s extraordinary achievements in product design – and the rapid growth those achievements have facilitated – have not gone unnoticed by the industry. In 2013, for example, the group positioned 45 in the esteemed BRW Fast 100. The following year, in 2014, they were recognised as an ABA100 Winner for Enterprise in the Australian Business Awards 2014. Those awards recognise Australian organisations that “achieve outstanding success whilst undertaking bold new ventures.” In LX’s case, the venture was an initiative to develop in-house manufacturing capabilities. The company’s core business of prototyping and product development often involves manufacturing runs of up to a few thousand AWARD RECOGNISED
LX Group | units for testing and certification. Offsite manufacturing of those units presents time constraints, as the average time for a production and shipping run is eight to 12 weeks. According to Simon, this is a significant period of time in the world of rapid product development. To decrease this time – as well as decrease costs – the company developed a small-scale onshore manufacturing system that has been in operation for several years now. “We now have a rapid prototyping facility that takes lead times down from eight weeks to three days,” Simon says. “Clients appreciate that.” LX’s projects have also been recognised individually. At the 2014 Sydney Engineering Excellence Awards, for instance, the company won the Software and Embedded Systems Excellence Award for their work on Project Caramello Koala. “As a company, we’ve wanted to win that award for a long time now,” Simon explains. “I went to my first awards night about seven years ago, and I actually kept the table decoration and put it on my desk. I thought ‘I
| LX Group want to win that one day.’” “So we’re very excited to have won,” he says. “It means a lot to me, and to our team. We’ve wona lot of awards nationally and internationally, both for how we run our business and for the actual designs that we introduce. The Engineering Excellence Awards, however, are some of the most prestigious in Australia, and they have quite a heavy engineering focus.” “There are very experienced engineers that come look in detail at how you’ve gone about solving a problem, how you implemented the solution,” he continues. “They look at the architecture, they look at the innovation. The level of due diligence that goes into it is extensive. The application is huge and in the judging session you get grilled quite a bit. So it means a lot to win at the end of the day.” The project that won LX the Sydney Engineering ExcellenceAward–ProjectCaramello Koala –was a response to the increasing risks facing the iconic native animal. Koalas have recently been listed as a vulnerable species, and monitoring programs are an essen-
LX Group | tial part of the effort to protect them. Previously, the relevant authorities had been spending a lot of money sending people out on a daily basis to run an intervention program to find out why koalas were dying so they could take preventative measures. The existing systems, however, could only provide simple data. They could track where the koalas physically were, but not verymuch beyond that. “The client came to us and said ‘Listen, we need a prototype in a really short period of time. We need to work together to solve this problem.’ And we did, and we had a lot of fun throughout the process.” The product of Project Caramello Koala is the K-Tracker – the only animal tracker in the world designed especially for koalas. The strangulation-resistant design is proven in the field to have “excellence animal welfare outcomes.” At 220 to 250 grams, the KTracker is well within the 3 to 5 per cent of body weight recommended for tracking devices, and its epoxy enclosure offers “unparalleled durability.” From a technical standpoint, the KTracker also provides high accuracy near-tolive tracking and more comprehensive data than what is available with any other existing system. The product features “dual sensor activity logging with motion profile analysis capabilities, orientation analysis, high-G and free fall detection as well as automatic low activity email report generation” – so trackers receive suspected mortality alerts immediately. “One of the main problems with running an intervention program is you need to know what’s killing the koalas,” Simon says. “It sounds morbid, but to do that you need fresh carcasses. When something goes wrong, you need to get the body quickly to find out what killed it – was it a disease, was it a dog attack, was it something else?” “The problem with a lot of the existing solutions was that they would tell you where the koala is, but not necessarily whether it was alive or dead,” he continues. “We developed a system that gives you a lot more information at your fingertips.”
| LX Group Moving forward, Simon says LXwill continue developing innovative, “internet-enabling” solutions of all kinds. They will also continue developing platforms and systems that will make those solutions more cost-effective to develop. Currently, they are working on a system that could very well revolutionise the marketplace. “Hardware is pretty expensive to design, and when I say that I’m talking about electronic circuit boards,” Simon explains. “We’re working on an approach, however, that makes it very easy and very inexpensive to build custom hardware.” “To anyone who’s spent half a million dollars developing custom hardware, they probably wouldn’t believe that with our system they could do it in a tenth of the time for a tenth of the budget,” he adds. “We’re very excited about that. For the people who don’t understand it, it would mean nothing. But for the people who do, it would mean a total change in the way things are done.” AN EXCITING FUTURE
LX Group |
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