Commentary: March 2005

To Innovate, See All Sides at Once

By Robert Kross

The three dimensions of a manufacturer’s business challenges are globalization, outsourcing, and mass customization. Manufacturers are working hard to adapt to these conditions with internal initiatives to improve ROI and get better products to market faster.

But unless, and not until, mainstream manufacturers think about product design as more than an exercise in geometry, they’ll miss key opportunities to shape innovation while they tweak the details.

Robert Kross

How would your company’s goods improve if your engineering team could design based on what a product actually does for its owner, rather than based on its geometry and features?

Customers tell manufacturers what they want a product to do. And design engineers envision some concept of function, ergonomics, even style. The handheld vacuum, for example, likely was conceived as a device capable of reaching into corners while being comfortable to hold. It wasn’t born of a collection of measurements, dimensions, and angles.

Yet that’s how products are designed today. Engineers sketch sophisticated ideas in two flat dimensions. Then they tweak features until their calculations suggest the design should work. Next, they convert the drawings to 3D virtual models or physical prototypes to approximate function. Then, and only then, can the designer find out whether his complex abstractions perform as intended. Often, it’s back to the drawing board.

Fortunately, there’s a brand new method of design that gets past those limitations. It’s called functional design, and it gives engineers intelligent tools that work like designers think so the process starts with the end product’s performance in mind, progressing to relationships among components. Unlike conventional drafting elements, functional design elements reflect the actual behavior of the parts they represent. A gear has torque and speed characteristics, and it “knows” it must interact with another gear—it’s not just a representation of a disk with a certain number of teeth of a specific dimension.

Functional design gets to the heart of product development. It offers real opportunities to reduce entire cycles, not just some mouse clicks that don’t attack real lost cost and wasted time in today’s design process.

For engineers who depend on conventional 2D methods, 3D modeling can become an exercise in software mastery, requiring time to figure out how to illustrate an idea in 3D. Without the drafting and abstract thinking required by conventional design, intuitive functional design is faster to grasp. When built into solid modeling tools, functional design even makes 3D design easier to adopt. The right designs are drawn faster.

Work begins with an approximation that’s much more representative of the customer’s request than a flat 2D schematic. Designers become more productive by skipping the step of abstracting ideas into geometric elements. They can optimize designs as they work, without over-engineering. Quality and cost tradeoffs are quickly modeled and reconciled with fewer prototyping and refinement cycles.

As manufacturers strive to trim costs, boost productivity, and get better goods to market faster, they must consider the added competitive advantage of functional design. It helps reduce costs by facilitating more cost-effective design choices. It helps manufacturers align those design choices with demand because initial designs are closer to their customers’ unique requirements and intended performance. It means fewer prototypes are required, resulting in additional cost savings that alleviate some pressures of global competition and outsourcing. And it substantially shortens the time from concept to shipment—a powerful advantage for mass customization.

The National Association of Manufacturers advocates a better-prepared 21st century workforce, and promotes innovation, investment, and productivity to strengthen US manufacturing. Given its rightful place among business strategy tools, functional design is a more direct route from concept to reality that will transform design and production, to help manufacturers beat the competition here and abroad.

Buzz Kross, VP of Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions Division, started as a mechanical engineer at Triangle Package Machinery, and spent nine years at GE before founding Woodbourne Inc. Send your thoughts about this commentary through e-mail c/o [email protected].