A New Breed of Engineer

By Lance Murphy

In today’s global marketplace, innovation is more than marketing hype — it’s a matter of survival. And with all the lip service being paid to it, we might assume this is good news for mainstream engineers who design new products. But is business and, in particular, manufacturing really ready for innovation?

Many agree that designers, not software, are the engines of product development innovation. In the past, each had his or her role in the process, acquiring more knowledge with each hard-won release. However, globalization has obliterated this linear paradigm, requiring engineers to work collaboratively with design teams, suppliers, plants, and customers around the world at all hours.

While this new paradigm is collapsing market cycles, it has blurred the lines between engineering functions, roles, and disciplines, creating a new breed of “lifecycle engineer.” Instead of throwing designs over the wall, lifecycle engineers can now optimize designs early on — in the virtual stage of development — for cost, quality, performance, sourcing, manufacturability, and even marketability.

But the concurrent processes that enable these results are creating a perfect storm that today’s most powerful tools might not be able to control. And the first casualty could be old-fashioned engineering innovation.

What’s happening on the front lines?
The escalating demand for new and improved products is putting enormous pressure on every person and process along the value chain. The demands being met have cut the time and cost of taking a product to market. Concurrently, engineers are being pressured to create and test more “marketable” designs. But as every engineer knows, innovation demands creativity, access to relevant information, and a lot of what-if exploration.

To complicate the challenge, most of the information that drives innovation is dynamic, collaborative, tribal, exploratory, etc.; only the engineer can translate data into innovations. As product complexity increases and market windows shrink, engineers cannot waste their “innovation potential” trying to capture the time and knowledge they need to create.

Answering the Challenge
We asked some engineers facing these challenges how they are answering the call.

“Engineers are all about solving problems,” says Paul Smythe, a lifecycle engineer working with global aerospace OEMs, “and in a virtual environment, you have far greater expectation that problem resolutions will arrive faster.” Smythe acknowledged, however, that despite improved speed, time remains a scarce resource: “My work priority is based on issue ‘severity,’ which is sometimes provided to me. But if not, I must evaluate it myself based on my experience or known customer needs. So having the right information is good, but I need more time to use it properly.”

ENOVIA is helping Tier 1 auto suppliers collaborate at every stage of the product development process.

On the plus side, Smythe explains that having greater exposure to the customer is appealing because it eliminates confusion between what is asked and what is actually needed. The opportunity to use more resources — within the organization and the industry — is a good thing and enables the engineering expert to evaluate the quality and reliability of the source firsthand, over time. It allows for the building of a large, competent network and knowledge base upon which engineers and designers can rely.

“This network,” says Smythe, “helps me provide quality solutions fast with fewer problems later and helps make me the ‘go-to-guy,’ which subsequently builds my value.”

Another perspective focusing on the ups and downs of collaboration comes from a project leader for a Fortune 500 auto manufacturer. “Working together in a virtual development environment,” says Chris MacKern, “reduces the number of iterations required because there’s increased clarity on the product definition from the beginning. It also improves planning and scheduling accuracy because the scope and requirements are fully understood before we make major commitments.”
Having the designers involved in the process early on ensures that the definition remains reasonable and focused and eliminates the need for late-stage changes and negotiation.

“Collaboration done well removes considerable aggravation because there’s much less rework,” adds MacKern. This necessitates all parties providing information at the beginning of projects so engineers on the design side have the time to work through requests and specifications for meaningful benefit.

As far as MacKern is concerned, the only downside to this collaboration model is that it “requires everyone to have their act together right up front.” And corporate-wide or inter-departmental collaboration becomes “an all or nothing proposition,” he says. “What I mean is that either the parties that need to be involved are truly up-to-speed contributors — or they aren’t. Unless the uppermost levels of management demand this level of cooperation and hold people accountable, it’s all a pipe dream.”

Innovating Success
At Tier 1 aerospace supplier Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC), Lucie Trudel, ENOVIA project manager, and Francois Mandeville, software quality and data management manager, committed more than six years to solving the dilemma of functional silos (solitary units) and inefficient processes at their company because they understood the negative impact on its “innovation potential.” While other companies study the problem or throw expensive tools at it, P&WC may have figured it out.

According to Mandeville, it’s true that everyone is dealing with more systems and more data than ever before, but this process is necessary to compete in the global marketplace.  “The problem,” says Mandeville, “is transforming the data into meaningful information, so those who need it can not only access and share it, but also act upon it. This is especially true for engineers.”

Pratt & Whitney Canada committed more than six years to solving the dilemma of functional silos and inefficient processes because of their negative impacts on innovation. With the help of ENOVIA, the company believes it has returned to the path of innovation.

Mandeville says engineers, responsible for the ultimate success of the product, need to solve problems quickly. But data without context can cause confusion — and designers can’t afford to waste time on low-value work, which discourages innovation. “The challenge for us,” says Mandeville, “was how to access all the product information, market data, customer experiences, and feedback out there and transform it into knowledge we could use.”

P&WC realized almost six years ago that it would not be able to continually improve the quality of products or the efficiency of its operations unless it gained control of processes. “We focus on two types of innovation: product and process,” says Trudel. “And they are equally important. For example, we had to do a better job of bringing the experience of our service center into our processes to improve their service and quality. So we developed a strategy: after running a ‘quality process’ experiment in our Service Center Quality group and solving lots of process problems, we realized that this approach could probably be duplicated in other departments.”

Trudel admits there was some initial resistance to this change among the company’s more experienced workers. But Trudel and Mandeville implemented a pilot project to demonstrate the benefits of their scheme.

“It wasn’t necessarily easy,” says Trudel, “but gradually, we started collaborating, sharing results, even competing to design the best processes.” Though there wasn’t much discussion about innovation in the beginning, once everyone invested in the strategy and started benefiting from it, then job satisfaction increased.

“Our knowledge of P&WC’s business increased,” Trudel said, “and we broke down those silos because everyone knew what we were doing and why, and had a say in the process.”

A Culture of True Collaboration
The initiative shepherded through P&WC by Mandeville and Trudel changed the company’s culture from one that simply valued innovation to one that encourages it, no matter the source. But, as Mandeville says, “This was the result of a well-thought-out strategy that included everything from workflows to training to reporting…. Our entire company has been trained. It took a lot of work and commitment.”

“And we wouldn’t have succeeded without support from the top,” emphasizes Trudel. “Our executives review the process reports every week and ensure appropriate corrective actions. Now, we can focus on the work we are supposed to be doing, except we can do it better. We have the time to create innovative products because we use innovative processes.”

Business leaders and mainstream engineers that we speak to all seem to be in agreement that there are more than just technology issues to understand in the search for breakthrough improvements and continuous innovation. There are cultural, educational, and job-satisfaction factors to consider when beginning the journey. Just as some people will see value in forming more inclusive development teams, others will see this evolution as a threat to job security and to workers with the most tribal knowledge. And while some engineers and managers might prefer to remain isolated in their functional silos, avoiding both additional responsibility and learning new processes, others will be motivated to spend time acquiring new knowledge and optimizing their skills — and reputations.

Undoubtedly, placing enterprise intellectual property and tribal knowledge within the reach of all participants and empowering them to use it requires top-down as well as bottom-up commitment. But building a culture that can maximize its innovation potential by helping engineers and partners and business managers work together to vet ideas and generate innovation promises to accomplish as much, if not more, than genius entrepreneurs in their garages, coffee shops, or ivory tower labs asking, “what if…?”

Dassault Systemes
ENOVIA
Paris, France
3ds.com

Lance Murphy is the product marketing manager for ENOVIA at Dassault Systemes. He has 10 years’ experience in product management and marketing. He earned an M.S. in higher education and political science from the University of Michigan.  You can send comments about this article to [email protected].