Research Rap: What is Engineering Doing to Shrink Development Time?

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.