Jim Brown

Research Rap: What is Engineering Doing to Shrink Development Time?
July 16, 2008

I posted earlier about What Gives Chief Engineers Sleepless Nights based on a benchmark report from Aberdeen Group. The report, The Engineering Executives Strategic Agenda, indicated that the number one pressure engineering faces is shrinking development schedules, which stood head and shoulders above the other challenges identified (including rising material costs, shrinking budgets, and customer expectations for prices to reduce even in this environment). The question that I did not delve into from the study is "so what the heck are we going to do about it?"

Engineering Taking Action
I would categorize the actions that Aberdeen uncovered in 3 basic categories:

• Designing it right the first time
• Speeding up processes
• Focusing on capturing and protecting engineering knowledge

Clearly each of these could be (and probably will be) topics for a benchmark on their own. For now, I will summarize each of these themes. The report has much more rich information than I can share here.

Right First Time
There is a lot to getting a product right the first time. And getting it right early means better products, but also fewer revisions to correct errors, leading to faster development cycles. One key way this was manifested was by the aspects of a product that Engineering departments are trying to get right early in design. The companies that Aberdeen identified as better than others in hitting their product development targets are designing products that are:

• Perform at the right level
• Are compliant with regulations
• Meet "green" environmental standards
• Are serviceable
• Have optimized costs in the supply chain

The key is that they are designing products from the beginning with these ends in mind. Another area identified is that leading companies are also doing a better job tracking their requirements and mapping them down to their subsystems.

Perhaps the biggest action identify in design right the first time had to do with validating designs early. Almost 3/4 of the survey respondents that were operating at higher levels of product development success are assessing product performance early. They are even going so far as to correlating computer aided engineering (CAE) / simulations (one of the most valuable ways to validate designs early) with actual physical tests, to ensure that simulations are reflecting the reality as closely as possible.

Speed up Processes
Early validation helps to reduce development times. But two other main concepts were identified here:

• Applying lean concepts to engineering (reducing waste and speeding up processes)
• Developing modular designs (speeding up design through reuse design components with defined interfaces, which also enables the reuse of simulation, testing, and analysis to reduce development cycles)

Capturing and Protecting Engineering Knowledge
Two main concepts were identified relating to engineering and product knowledge. 

• Improving the ability to capture (and reuse) engineering knowledge (decreasing time by not reinventing the wheel)
• Protecting product intellectual property (not directly related to development times, but a clear focus for many companies today
  
  The interesting thing is that the better you do in capturing knowledge, the better you need to be at protecting that IP.

So that was a further peek into some recent research on what gives Engineering execs sleepless nights (and what they are doing to regain a good night rest). I hope you found it interesting.

Does the research reflect reality? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Posted by Jim Brown on July 16, 2008 | Comments (2)