Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Engineering Mindset’

Focus, focus, focus. Measure, measure, measure. We draw organizational boxes, control volumes, and measure ins and outs. Cost, quality, delivery.

Control volumes? Open a Ziploc bag and pour water in it. The bag is the control volume and the water is the organizational ooze. Feel free to swim around in the bag, but don’t slip through it because you’ll cross an interface. You’ll get counted.

Organizational control volumes are important. They define our teams and how we optimize (within the control volumes).  We optimize locally. But there’s more than one bag in our organizations.

The red team designs new products. They wear red shirts, red pants, and red hats. They do red things. We measure them on product function. The blue team makes products. They wear blue and do blue things. We measure them on product cost. Both are highly optimized within their bags, yet the system is suboptimal. Nothing crosses the interface – no information, no knowledge, no nothing. All we have is red and blue. What we need is purple.

We need people with enough courage to look up one level, put on a blue shirt and red pants, and optimize at the system level. We need people with enough credibility to swap their red hat for blue and pass information across the interface. We need trusted people to put on a purple jumpsuit and take responsibility for the interface.

Purple behavior cuts across the fabric of our metrics and control volumes, which makes it difficult and lonely. But, thankfully some are willing to be purple. And why do they do it?  Because they know customers see only one color – purple.

Cost Out, Cost Down, Cost Reduction, Should Costing – you’ve heard about these programs. But they’re not what they seem. Under the guise of reducing product costs they steal profit margin from suppliers. The customer company increases quarterly profits while the supplier company loses profits and goes bankrupt. I don’t like this. Not only is this irresponsible behavior, it’s bad business. The savings are less than the cost of qualifying a new supplier. Shortsighted. Stupid.

The real way to do it is to design out product cost, to reduce the cost signature. Margin is created and shared with suppliers. Suppliers make more money when it’s done right. That’s right, I said more money. More dollars per part, and not more from the promise of increased sales. (Suppliers know that’s bullshit just as well as you, and you lose credibility when you use that line.) The Design Engineering community are the only folks that can pull this off.

Only the Design Engineers can eliminate features that create cost while retaining features that control function. More function, less cost. More margin for all. The trick: how to get Design Engineers involved.

There is a belief that Design Engineers want nothing to do with cost. Not true. Design Engineers would love to design out cost, but our organization doesn’t let us, nor do they expect us to. Too busy; too many products to launch; designing out cost takes too long. Too busy to save 25% of your material cost? Really? Run the numbers – material cost times volume times 25%. Takes too long? No, it’s actually faster. Manufacturing issues are designed out so the product hits the floor in full stride so Design Engineers can actually move onto designing the next product. (No one believes this.)

Truth is Design Engineers would love to design products with low cost signatures, but we don’t know how. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that no one ever taught us. What the Design Engineers need is an investment in the four Ts – tools, training, time,  and a teacher.

Run the numbers.  It’s worth the investment.

Material cost x Volume x 25%

Improvement is good; we all want it. Whether it’s Continuous Improvement (CI), where goodness, however defined, is improved incrementally and continually, or Discontinuous Improvement (DI), where goodness is improved radically and steeply, we want it. But, it’s not enough to want it.

How do we create the Improvement Mindset, where the desire to make things better is a way of life? The traditional non-answer goes something like this: “Well, you know, a lot of diverse factors have to come together in a holistic way to make it happen.  It takes everyone pulling in the same direction.” Crap. If I had to pick the secret ingredient that truly makes a difference it’s this:

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People with the courage to see things as they are.

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People who can hold up the mirror and see warts as warts and problems as problems – they’re the secret ingredient. No warts, no improvement. No problems, no improvement. And I’m not talking about calling out the benign problems. I’m talking about the deepest, darkest, most fundamental problems, problems some even see as strengths, core competencies, or even as competitive advantage. Problems so fundamental, and so wrong, most don’t see them, or dare see them.

The best-of-the-best can even acknowledge warts they themselves created. Big medicine. It’s easy to see warts or problems in others’ work, but it takes level 5 courage to call out the ugliness you created. Nothing is off limits with these folks, nothing left on the table. Wide open, no-holds-barred, full frontal assault on the biggest, baddest crap your company has to offer. It’s hard to do. Like telling a mother her baby is ugly – it’s one thing to think the baby is ugly, but it’s another thing altogether to open up your mouth and acknowledge it face-to-face, especially if you’re the father. (Disclaimer: To be clear, I do not recommend telling your spouse your new baby is ugly. Needless to say, some things MUST be left unsaid.)

It’s not always easy to be around the courageous souls willing to jeopardize their careers for the sake of improvement. And it takes level 5 courage to manage them. But, if you want your company to contract a terminal case of the Improvement Mindset, it’s a price you must pay.

Click this link for information on Mike’s upcoming workshop on Systematic DFMA Deployment

Axiom 1 – Time is short, so make sure you’re working on the most important stuff.

Axiom 2 – You can’t design out what you can’t see.

In product development, these two axioms can keep you out of trouble. They’re two sides of the same coin, but I’ll describe them one at a time and hope it comes together in the end.

With Axiom 1, how do you make sure you’re working on the most important stuff? We all know it’s function first – no learning there. But, sorry design engineers, it doesn’t end with function. You must also design for lean, for cost, and factory floor space. Great. More things to design for. Didn’t you say time was short? How the hell am I going to design for all that?

Now onto the seeing business of Axiom 2. If we agree that lean, cost, and factory floor space are the right stuff, we must “see it” if we are to design it out. See lean? See cost? See factory floor space? You’re nuts.  How do you expect us to do that?

Pareto to the rescue – use Pareto charts to identify the most important stuff, to prioritize the work. With Pareto, it’s simple: work on the biggest bars at the expense of the smaller ones. But, Paretos of what?

There is no such thing as a clean sheet design – all new product designs have a lineage. A new design is based on an existing design, a baseline design, with improvements made in several areas to realize more features or better function defined by the product specification. The Pareto charts are created from the baseline design to allow you to see the things  to design out (Axiom 2). But what lenses to use to see lean, cost, and factory floor space?

Here are Pareto’s three lenses so see what must be seen:

To lean out lean out your factory, design out the parts. Parts create waste and part count is the surrogate for lean.

To design out cost, measure cost. Cost is the surrogate for cost.

To design out factory floor space, measure assembly time. Since factory floor space scales with assembly time, assembly time is the surrogate for factory floor space.

Now that your design engineers have created the right Pareto charts and can see with the right glasses, they’re ready to focus their efforts on the most important stuff. No boiling the ocean here. For lean, focus on part count of subassembly 1; for cost, focus on the cost of subassemblies 2 and 4; for floor space, focus on assembly time of subassembly 5. Leave the others alone.

Focus is important and difficult, but Pareto can help you see the light.

Everyone wants growth – but how? We know innovation is a key to growth, but how do we do it? Be creative, break the rules, think out of the box, think real hard, innovate. Those words don’t help me. What do I do differently after hearing them?

I am a process person, processes help me. Why not use a process to improve innovation? Try this: set up a meeting with your best innovators and use “process” and “innovation” in the same sentence. They’ll laugh you off as someone that doesn’t know the front of a cat from the back. Take your time to regroup after their snide comments and go back to your innovators.  This time tell them how manufacturing has greatly improved productivity and quality using formalized processes. List them – lean, Six Sigma, DFSS, and DFMA. I’m sure they’ll recognize some of the letters. Now tell them you think a formalized process can improve innovation productivity and quality. After the vapor lock and brain cramp subsides, tell them there is a proven process for improved innovation.

A process for innovation? Is this guy for real? Innovation cannot be taught or represented by a process. Innovation requires individuality of thinking. It’s a given right of innovators to approach it as they wish, kind of  like freedom of speech where any encroachment on freedom is a slippery slope to censorship and stifled thinking. A process restricts, it standardizes, it squeezes out creativity and reduces individual self worth. People are either born with the capability to innovate, or they are not. While I agree that some are better than others at creating new ideas, innovation does not have to be governed by hunch, experience and trial and error. Innovation does not have to be like buying lottery tickets. I have personal experience using a good process to help stack the odds in my favor and help me do better innovation.  One important function of the innovation process is to break intellectual inertia.

Intellectual inertia must be overcome if real, meaningful innovation is to come about. When intellectual inertia reigns, yesterday’s thinking carries the day.  Yesterday’s thinking has the momentum of a steam train puffing and bellowing down the tracks. This old train of thought can only follow a single path – the worn tracks of yesteryear, and few things are powerful enough to derail it. To misquote Einstein:

The thinking that got us into this mess is not the thinking that gets us out of it.

The notion of intellectual inertia is the opposite of  Einstein’s thinking. The intellectual inertia mantra: the thinking that worked before is the thinking that will work again.  But how to break the inertia? Read the rest of this entry »

As an engineering leader I work with design engineers every day. I like working with them, it’s fun. It’s comfortable for me because I understand us.  Yes, I am an engineer.

I know what we’re good at, and I know we’re not good at. I’ve heard the jokes. Some funny, some not.  But when engineers and non-engineers work well together, there’s lots of money to be made. I figure it’s time to explain how engineers tick so we can make more money. An engineer explaining engineers, to non-engineers – a flawed premise?  Maybe, but I’ll roll the dice.

Everyone knows why design engineers are great to have around.  Want a new product?  Put some design engineers on it.  Want to solve a tough technical problem?  Put some design engineers on it. Want to create something from nothing? Design engineers. Everyone also knows we can be difficult to work with. (I know I can be.) How can we be high performing in some contexts and low performing in others? What causes the flip between modes? Understanding what’s behind this dichotomy is the key to understanding engineers. What’s behind this?  In a word, “change”.  And if you understand change from an engineer’s perspective, you understand engineers.  If you remember just one sentence, here it is:

To engineers, change equals risk, and risk is bad.

Why do we think that way?  Because that’s who we are; we’re walking risk reduction machines. And that’s good because in this time of doing more, doing it with less, and doing it faster, companies are taking more risk.  Engineers make sure risk is always part of  the risk-reward equation.

The best way to explain how engineers think about change and risk is to give examples.  Here three examples.

Changing a drawing for manufacturing

Several months after product launch, with things running well, there is a request to change an engineering print.  Change the print? That print is my recipe. I know how it works and when it doesn’t.  That recipe works.  My job is to make sure it works, and someone wants to change it?  I’m not sure it will work.  Did I tell you it’s my job to make sure it works? I don’t have time to test it thoroughly. Remember, when I say it will work, you expect that it will.  I’m not sure the change will work.  I don’t want to take the risk.  Change is risk.

Changing the specification

This is a big one.  Three months into a new product development project, the performance specification is changed, moving it north into unknown territory.  The customer will benefit from the increased performance, we understand this, but the change created risk. The knowledge we created over the last three months may not be relevant, and we may have to recreate it. We want to meet the new specification (we’re passionate about product and technology), but we don’t know if we can. You count on us to be sure that things will work, and we pride ourselves on our ability to do that for you.  But with the recent specification change, we’re not sure we can get it done. That’s risk, that’s uncomfortable for us, and that’s the reason we respond as we do to specification changes.  Change is risk.

Changing how we do product development

This is the big one. We have our ways of doing things and we like them. Our design processes are linear, rational, and make sense (to us). We know what we can deliver when we follow our processes; we know about how long it will take; and we know the product will work when we’re done. Low risk. Why do you want us to change how we do things? Why do you want to add risk to our processes? All we’re trying to do is deliver a great product for you. Change is risk.

Engineers have a natural bias toward risk reduction. I am not rationalizing or criticizing, just explaining. We don’t expect zero risk; we know it’s about risk optimization and not risk minimization.  But it’s important to keep your eye on us to make sure our risk pendulum does not swing too far toward minimization. The great American philosopher Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”   But that’s not the case here.

When it comes to engineers and risk reduction, too much of a good thing is not wonderful.

Improving product robustness is straightforward and difficult. Here’s how to do it.

Identify specific failure modes, prioritize them, and go after the biggest ones first. Failure modes can be identified through multiple sources. Warranty data is sometimes coded by failure mode (more precisely, symptom type), so start there. The number one failure mode in this type of data is typically “no problem found”, so be ready for it. Analysis of the actual products that come back is another good way. Returned product is routed to the appropriate engineer who analyzes it and enters the failure mode into a database. A formal design FMEA generates a list of prioritized failure modes through the risk priority number (RPN), where larger is more important. To do this, engineers are hauled into a room and a facilitator helps them come up with potential failure modes. One caution – the process can generate many failure modes, more than you can fix, so make the top five or ten go away and don’t argue the bottom fifty. It makes no sense to even talk about number eleven if you haven’t fixed the top ten. But the best way I have found to identify failure modes (problems) that are meaningful to the customer is to ask the technical services group for their top five things to fix. They will give you the right answer because they interact daily with customers who have broken product. They won’t expect you to listen to them (you never listened before), so surprise them by fixing one or two on their list. They will be grateful you listened (they’ll likely want to buy you coffee for the rest of your career) and your customers will notice.

Once failure modes are identified, define the physics of failure – why the product breaks. This is tough work and requires focused thought and analysis. If, when you break the product, it “looks like” the ones coming back from the field, you have defined the physics of failure. This is the same thing as replicating the problem in the lab. Once that’s defined, create an automated test rig or experimental setup that breaks the product in a way that captures the physics of failure. I call this test rig a robustness surrogate because it stands in for the actual failure mode seen in the field. The robustness surrogate should break the product as fast as possible while retaining the physics of failure so you can break it and fix it many times before product launch. The robustness surrogate should be designed to break the product within minutes, not hours or days – the faster the better.

To know if product robustness is improved, the baseline (or existing) design is broken on the robustness surrogate. The new design must survive longer on the robustness surrogate than the baseline design. The result is A/B data (baseline design/ new design) that is presented at the design review using a simple bar graph format which I call big-bar-little-bar. Keep improving robustness of the new design even if it outperforms the baseline design by a factor of ten – that’s not good enough for your customers.

Don’t stop improving robustness until you run out of time, and don’t stop if you meet the arbitrary MTBF specification. Customers like improved robustness, and in this case too much of a good thing is wonderful.

Using this method, I reduced warranty cost per unit by 75% over a five year period. It worked.

In a previous post I defined the term brand-damaging threshold and said I’d talk about how to improve product robustness. So, here goes.

Every company is at a different stage in their formalized product robustness efforts, so it’s challenging to talk meaningfully to everyone. But there are two especially meaningful principles that have served me well through the years.

I had the privilege of working with Don Clausing - Total Quality Design, The House of Quality, Enhanced QFD, and Robust Quality. I vividly remember the conversation where Don shared one of his secrets. As we watched a robustness test run, Don, in his terse way, barked out a guiding principle of improving product robustness. He said:

“Improve robustness at the expense of predicting it.”

I asked Don what the hell he meant (he liked to make his students work for it), and after some prodding, he went on to explain why it’s so important. He said people spend far too much time running tests to predict robustness and then spend even more time calculating mean time between failures (MTBF). If that’s not enough, then they spend time arguing about MTBFs and the confidence intervals. He said companies should dedicate all their time and energy improving robustness. “That’s what matters to the customer,” he said. And then he continued with something like: “Predicting robustness is worse than a simple waste of time.” (He wasn’t that polite.) But I still didn’t get it. What’s the big deal about predicting robustness? Read the rest of this entry »

2009 is a tough year, especially for CEOs.

CEOs have a strong desire to do what it takes to deliver shareholder value, but that’s coupled with a deep concern that tough decisions may dismantle the company in the process.

Here is the state-of-affairs:

Sales are down and money is tight.  There is severe pressure to cut costs including those that are linked to sales – marketing budgets, sales budgets, travel – and things that directly impact customers – technical service, product manuals, translations, and warranty.

Pricing pressure is staggering.  Customers are exerting their buying power – since so few are buying they want to name their price (and can).  Suppliers, especially the big ones, are using their muscle to raise prices.

Capacity utilization is ultra-low, so the bounce-back of new equipment sales is a long way off.

Everyone wants to expand into new markets to increase sales, but this is a particularly daunting task with competitors hunkering down to retain market share, cuts in sales and marketing budgets, and hobbled product development engines.

There is a desire to improve factory efficiency to cut costs (rather than to increase throughput like in 2008), but no one wants to spend money to make money – payback must be measured in milliseconds.

So what’s a CEO to do?  Read the rest of this entry »