Matthias Ströhlein, Director, Supply Chain Management, Native Instruments: Now over 25 years, Native Instruments is on the forefront of sonic innovation. We developed integrated audio hardware and software solutions to inspire and enable musicians, producers, engineers, and DJs to express themselves.
Igor Vargotsky, Senior Mechanical Engineer, Native Instruments: Shaping musical instruments is not always about technology. It’s about creating instruments and setting the rules of the game that make people creative.
Hannah Borland, Senior QA Engineer, Native Instruments: I think music makes the world a better place, and to play a part in that is really, really great, and it seems to attract really a special kind of person.
Vargotsky: The team consists of electrical engineers, firmware engineers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers. We are just doing multifunctional hardware design, that means that we start with ideation where the work with industrial design plays a big role in. During later phases of development, there is more communication and collaboration with electrical engineers. In the final stages of the product, there is a lot of ping-pong and communication with suppliers.
Johannes Schroth, Lead Industrial Designer, Native Instruments: For us, the really next transformative step was to go to the same platform that became Fusion. It really brought us together but it also helped with new ways of working, remotely for example. You need a tool that works in the cloud.
Abel Garcia Poyato Falcon, Director, Delivery Management, Native Instruments: The bit of experience that was missing for me before is that I had never worked in a company that is so full of passion for our products and for our customers.
Vargotsky: We are able to work in the same platform with our industrial designers. They start their conceptual sketches in Fusion, and at a certain stage I am able to take over their work and iterate on certain ideas with them and make their ideas manufacturing-ready.
Schroth: We created for our 25th anniversary, in a very short time, a line of limited editions of almost every product line that we have. So there was like 500 customized parts. Crazy. Only possible with a PLM [Product Lifecycle Management] system to manage that complexity.
Vargotsky: It’s very well-suited to the nature of modern hardware design where communication plays a crucial role. Like the development cycles become increasingly smaller and you kind of need to compensate for that with quality communication and ability to adopt your design and present design changes quickly and communicate design changes across different teams. That’s kind of what ticks many boxes with the way that we develop things.
Falcon: We also do distributed development with our partners in China. One clear example of how we interact with the engineers and the Autodesk tools is when we do design reviews, all looking at the latest revision of the design, ideally in real time. These features have allowed us to stay in sync with a single source of truth and be able to comment in real time on changes or decisions that we need to implement.
Vargotsky: That’s an essential tool, when it’s about working with suppliers and communicating designs outside of organization.
Matthias Geserick, Senior Customer Care Agent: It’s an instrument that they use for years. And the instrument already is part of their life and it tells little kind of stories. And for that reason, they want to have repaired their instrument. For example, they live in Australia or far away. So the shipping costs would be huge to bring those hardware, let’s say a keyboard to Germany. And of course they ask us, can you send us the spare part? And Fusion Manage enables me to just find it directly in the database, to detect it, and to send it to the customer of all the specs that they need.
Vargotsky: Rather than just creating boxes with buttons, we’re manufacturing musical instruments. It’s something that helps people to become creative.
Borland: We make products that are fun. They’re beautiful.
Schroth: We want to create this fantastic, rewarding experience, when you buy the controller. You put it on the first time and the lights come on. And the interface comes alive. Basically creating this premium experience. But all that goes into the background when the instrument is on. It’s immersive. It’s just you and the sounds.
Executive insights
Executive insights
Emerging Tech
