Optimal Design
Strategizing for Superior Product Development

The Internet of Things (IoT) stands to become a multi-trillion dollar market for business transformation by the end of the decade. With Gartner predicting that 4.9 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2015, this is only an increasing reality. “Several industries are adopting IoT solutions for increasing efficiency, improving their customer’s experience, understanding the analytics in manufacturing processes, and establishing additional revenue streams for their business,” says Sajid Patel, CEO and Principal, Optimal Design. A technology focused engineering and product development firm, Optimal Design helps its clients in navigating the unique challenges of designing, engineering and manufacturing Internet-connected devices, in particular pertaining to issues with device/cloud security and connectivity.

Optimal Design delivers IoT solutions for customers across several industries such as consumer electronics, medical, consumer durables, industrial electronics, and many others. Based in Arlington Heights, IL, Optimal Design helps clients integrate reliable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for their products. The firm works towards serving various customers, to manage complexities within their entire product life cycle. “To help our customers, our team independently provides solutions that enable a better end user experience, have high reliability once installed, and offer additional value to our client via analytics that can be performed on the data our devices collect and push to the cloud.” explains Patel.

Optimal Design provides expert perspective, with more than 150 patents and over a decade of experience in the IoT market. The company is also an Authorized Design Partner with Microchip, the leading provider of micro controllers used in Internet-connected devices. All of this allows Optimal Design to help their clients reduce product development time and costs while delivering a superior product.

The firm has a unique and proven approach when it comes to project execution—the parallel development process. In this methodology, engineering teams design the product in collaboration with the industrial design team.Patel continues, “Our process allows our engineering teams to innovate on the technical side and feed this innovation back to our design teams. This parallel process ensures on-going communication that ensures both teams are driving innovative ideas in their respective disciplines. This process has proven to be incredibly effective.”

In one instance, the firm worked with Motorola and developed IoT and data analytics solutions for the company. The solutions enabled the customer to collect data from various devices from production line to the cloud, effectively reducing the scrap and wastage from 20 percent to a mere five percent, improving production process and identifying opportunities for automation through analytics.

We believe two core aspects enable Optimal Design to deliver world class solutions to our clients. The first is our legacy and knowledge base in wireless and connected electronics, both in design and engineering. Secondly, our firm belief that in-house, multidisciplined teams of designers and engineers working in a collaborative environment is the most effective path to innovative products

Optimal Design differentiates itself with its team of experts and its broad experience base in the technology industry. The team researches the market landscape, and uses ergonomics and human interface technology for delivering the best customer experience.

Over the last 20 years, the Mobile products industry has revolutionized the world of IoT with advancement in power consumption, maximized bandwidth, RF technology, and connection hardware—sectors in which Optimal Design has core competencies. Patel foresees Optimal Design being a big player in the wearable electronics and augmented Reality space in the near future. “Along with the wearables, we will also be focusing on Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR AR), currently we are seeing significant business expansion in the IoT industry as a whole,” concludes Patel. Optimal Design will continue to strive to provide clients everything they need to create robust, easy-to-use products that look as great as they work.