What we did
PRG provided FreeWire Technologies with our NPI IMPACT solution, which allowed multiple, diverse PRG experts to be brought in as required to accelerate progress.
Results
FreeWire Technologies met a critical end-of-year shipping milestone along with product improvements that enabled the next round of funding.
Company: FreeWire Technologies
Headquarters: San Leandro, California, USA
What they do: FreeWire Technologies is a leader in the design and manufacture of mobile power and EV charging solutions. Their products provide reliable and sustainable electrification beyond the grid.
Challenge
FreeWire Technologies had generated strong demand and interest from Fortune 500 companies. However, the product was still in the final stages of engineering and was not ready for full-scale manufacturing. Management needed realistic timelines for product development/scaling of their Mobi® product and to meet a critical milestone to support the next round of funding.
Solution
PRG provided a group of seasoned product commercialization experts to address FreeWire Technology’s goals as part of the NPI IMPACT solution and helped build a strong in-house team for supporting current and future growth.
PRG’s team of industry veterans supported the following activities
- Product and release management
- NPI program management
- Support services
- Product reliability
- Test development engineering
- Production documentation and process optimization
- Materials, supply chain, and contract manufacturing.
Charting the way forward
Like many companies, FreeWire Technologies faced challenges to achieve its year-end goals and keep to schedule. It also needed to show its backers that their investments were being used wisely and should be augmented in a further funding round.
Creating transparency and clarity
A baseline status across all areas of the business was established through the use of
- A defined project plan with clear dependencies
- A set of test plans which could show how product specifications could be met
- Complete alignment of the Product and Engineering team’s priorities through documentation
- Implementation of a complete NPI process to scale production.
Getting to market faster
Given the newness of both the product and the market immaturity, it was important to prioritize the challenges to get to the required scale of deliveries
- Enhancing the supply chain to ensure all components were available when needed
- Demonstrating product traction to obtain new funding by being on time to market
- Controlling costs to validate profitability and maximize future product potential.
The right people, processes, and relationships
PRG mobilized the highest-level skills across a broad team of experts to speed the transition of the product from prototype to scalable production.
Technical Program Management
PRG’s Technical Program Manager (TPM) and FreeWire Technologies’ leadership worked closely together to manage a team of top PRG talent, bringing capabilities to areas such as the definition of product requirements, delivery objectives, and business goals.
Together, FreeWire Technologies and PRG gained consensus on the product architecture and development priorities, created project plans, held weekly meetings, and sourced long lead-time components to guide the program towards the final deliverables. An NPI process for FreeWire Technologies was developed along the way which worked in harmony with current practices while introducing higher quality standards for product development, using dynamically assigned, on-demand resources from the PRG talent pool.
The final result
By leveraging PRG’s on-demand team of NPI IMPACT experts, FreeWire Technologies completed development and NPI for Mobi® initial shipments before the year-end, as planned. Production ramped up in the following months to fulfill orders to major companies. PRG and FreeWire Technologies established processes to enable consistent quality and scalable manufacturing in large quantities.
Our company made a huge bet on our ability to make a dramatic shift from prototype to scalable manufacturing. NPI IMPACT helped us build an organization, reduce risks, and get our product to market on time. We hit the goals.
— Martin Lynch, COO, FreeWire Technologies
Key benefits of engagement with PRG
- Established NPI processes to ensure a high-quality product without defects or reliability issues for high-volume scale
- Ramped production to fulfill pre-booked orders to major companies
- Met highly optimistic year-end shipping milestones, despite the product’s challenging, technically complex nature
- Cost reductions and improvements garnered another round of funding
- Hired a VP of Operations and Manufacturing Operations Manager from within PRG’s network of contacts.
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