What is Non-Recurring Engineering?
Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) is a one time engineering effort by a vendor that is paid for by a customer. NRE is driven by a feature or capability that a product lacks and acustomer wants enough to pay for.
The fundamental issue that NRE highlights is that the demand for it is triggered because the product doesn’t provide the customer with enough value out of the box.
NRE is generally requested by customers under the following circumstances:
•
A customer doesn't like the way the system behaves. This could be a missing
feature, a platform that is not supported etc. The customer may look for a way to
convince the vendor of the importance of their request. Offering to pay for NRE is
one way to do this. A customer’s willingness to pay for NRE is a good indication of
how much they want this done.
•
A customer wishes to move up the priority of an already planned feature into an
earlier release. From the vendor’s perspective this is basically a resource
scheduling issue. The vendor needs to carefully examine the implications of
changing their schedule.
•
The vendor stopped supporting a previous version and the customer is willing to
pay for making changes to this version.
“The good news about NREs is that when customers spend money on NRE they
are planning on being a customer for a long time.”
