National Semi's WEBENCH Visualizer

On her Outside Innovation blog, Patty Seybold of The Patricia Seybold Group, author of Customers.com and The Customer Revolution, has a good look at National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer that allows B2B customers to use his Website and tools to design, specify, simulate, and test complete circuitry, which they can then purchase either as a complete priced-out Bill of Materials from dozens of partners or purchase an evaluation board that is built same day and shipped overnight.


"What interests me about National Semiconductor's WEBENCH Visualizer," says Patty, "is:

1. It's a tool that enables customers to create better designs and to make better design decisions.

2. It's a tool that helps engineers (National's customers) do their jobs and helps them make trade-offs based on the criteria that matter most to their customers (electronics manufacturers like Nokia, Apple, and others).

3. It uses a variety of visualization techniques to let customers work the way their minds work (spreadsheets, dials, graphical bubble chart, circuit diagrams, parts and price lists, waveforms) all in one interactive dashboard.

4. It is interactive and iterative with real-time feedback. As I change my mind or try something different, I see the results.

5. Behind the scenes, there's a lot of data and number crunching going on to provide results that are optimized for my changing criteria.

6. There's an entire customer-centric ecosystem of suppliers, distributors and other partners integrated into this dashboard. Over 100 suppliers' products are integrated into one simple dashboard for customers to use to create their designs and their multi-supplier bills of materials.

7. Customers can share their designs with their customers and engage with them in experimenting with different trade-offs.

8. It's a powerful tool that is provided free of charge to customers because National Semiconductor has learned that the easier they make it for customers to design their products, the more of their business they get."

For more screenshots and details, click to Patty's Blog.