Engineering

This won't go over so well with the Technical Community, but it is the truth. "Engineering is the root of all evil". When you get past the natural reaction of being defensive and start analyzing the root cause of quality problems, field returns, assembly issues, supply chain difficulties, whatever it may be, you'll ultimately find your way back to Engineering! Why, because as soon as that pencil hits the paper, or in today's analogy, as soon as the mouse clicks the icon, the future of the design is cast in stone and a repeat of past sins. However, the past mistakes can be avoided if your development teams are aware of and embrace the concepts of collaborative development, lean manufacturing, Supply Chain involvement and DFX. Only by commencing new development with these concepts in the forefront, will your products and services begin to hit their mark on cost targets, reliability values and customer satisfaction.

I have a great saying that really hits home: "If Engineering develops the product or service correctly, they touch the design only once. However, the people in Manufacturing and the rest of the Supply Chain touch it every day!" Engineers must get out of their cubes and get to know the people in the rest of the organization and what their needs are in order to develop really great products and services. They need to know who their internal customers are!

Example Situations

Read the following and see if you can relate to any of these situations; if you do, we can help you break out of these adverse trends:

Situation 1: Your products require tools as part of the installation and/or operation.

In order to install the product you require your field service personnel to use tools and in order to operate the product you require your customers to have not only a tool, "but a special" tool that you had to design in order to for them to use the product.

If you can relate to this your team has not achieved their goals. They are not listening to your customers.

Situation 2: Just exactly how many different development tools do you really have?

Granted, people just don't deliberately do things inefficiently, they try to be accommodating. However, when being accommodating impacts the principles of Lean, then you need to lay down the law. I observed one company that had four different Mechanical design tools because why? You guessed it, they had four Mechanical Engineers! Each knew their own design tool. So in order to be accommodating, the management destroyed their flexibility of resources. Only one Engineer was able to work on their own design and when they were out of the office, no work was done on that project..

Situation 3: But if we only knew!

This is a situation where lack of collaborative Supply Chain involvement was a detriment. As you may have read from the Supply Chain link in the Operations section, the Supply Chain is a valuable resource of untapped knowledge. The "not invented here, a.k.a. NIH" syndrome prevents us from asking questions that have already been answered. Imagine being able to cut your pcb material costs significantly and reduce the scrap you are paying for at the supplier. PCB manufacturers use industry standard panel sizes for the manufacture of your boards. If you knew, that by reducing the size of one axis by less than an inch you would be enabling the supplier to fit multiple boards on one panel for the same cost of raw material, wouldn't you jump at the chance?!

Situation 4: I'm not doing my job if I don't develop new things!

Unfortunately, that's how some people feel as a result of their management. If they aren't using the latest technology or designing in something new every time, then they feel they are not doing their job. However, just the opposite is true. Imagine designing in a new locking device that wasn't used before. However, this new item is metric and will now require Manufacturing and the Field Service Personnel to obtain new tools for one item.

Reuse of proven designs, standardized components and reduced components are an effective approach to reducing cost in product development.

How we may help:

You must have an effective development process in order to be successful. The key is not only knowing when to proceed, but also what programs need to be terminated due to missing the window of opportunity, missing features and missing cost targets. Our experience in designing and implementing effective new product development processes will enable your teams to deliver products and services in a reduced cycle time, with features that your customers actually want and at a cost you can afford. Contact us today in order to help you break out of the development nightmare. We have many more "situations" to share in order to convince you we know what we're talking about and we know how to make things better!

• Defining the requirements for the product or service
• Getting management support
• Collaborative Development: Operations, Supply Chain, Customers
• Effective Design Reviews
• Key Milestones
• Preventing "feature creep"