Simplify the Design Engineering Path

Rob Walker, a technology blogger for The New York Times, recently wrote about the “golden age of design” and pointed out that the respected and notable Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers added John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, as a partner. Walker said that the venture capitalist leader “has noticed more designers starting companies with the help of engineers, rather than the other way around.”

This new model in product development has led companies like Google to invest more than $3 billion in Nest Labs, a company that makes aesthetically attractive smart thermostats; in fact, it was one of Google’s largest investments ever. The same model helped Twitter’s co-founder start Square—a company that allows a small square device to plug into a smart device and accept credit card payments—replacing the swipe machine.

A knowledgeable consultant can bring value to a product development team by showing them a path in a competitive landscape that is sometimes intimidating. For engineering design, consulting has taken on a new personality. Complexity consulting has arrived.

Creativity consulting helps navigate the complexities of the environment, buyer psychology, and all the supporting networks that surround design challenges. Today’s consultants are called upon to solve and prevent problems and create value where little existed before. They also help clear the path to success by cutting through the thicket that designers face in today’s world.

More Competitive on a Smaller Scale

Sara Gilbert is president of Pinewoods Engineering in North Chill, NY. She says consultants have been common and necessary to bring in specialized expertise to achieve results.

“When I was employed by a large private consulting firm we would also outsource skills we didn’t have, like wetland delineations,” says Gilbert. “We had a very close relationship with the outsource firm. We would sometimes outsource components like architectural or survey that we had the capability to do but we knew smaller firms could do it much cheaper than we could. It was a way as a large company to make our projects more competitive on a smaller scale.”

She adds that a consultant will sometimes roll up their shirtsleeves and get right into the design for the client, yet keeping it seamless as if they were an extension of the design activity.

“I am a hydraulics engineer, so I will prepare a design and report and work with their drafters to get the design on the plans,” says Gilbert. “Most companies do not like to make it obvious to their clients that they are outsourcing.”

Getting There, from Here

Jochen Gleisberg, partner, Operations Strategy group at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants based in Stuttgart, Germany, says optimizing the design process begins with defining the actual status quo and the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization or processes, and comparing the status quo against best practices from other companies within and without their own industries. This, he says, helps companies reflect on improvement, and define their own strengths.

Once the strengths are defined, his practice will define the to-be state by examining the status quo and finding where improvements are possible. From this, the to-be state is developed. For example, this may be reducing the time to market timeframe by X% he explains, or improving the interface between sales and engineering to enhance the process of defining specifications or developing a harmonized technologies and product roadmap.

He adds that it is very important to develop concrete actions for each candidate for improvement. “A concrete concept for the future state and the corresponding action or implementation plan needs to be derived,” he says. “Here also external benchmarks [and] potentially open benchmarks, where the external consultants can moderate such a process, can help to define the optimum solution and also help to overcome the typical resistance against change.”

The processes they moderate though, often are further challenged by cultural differences between the countries and associated markets they plan to enter. For example, Gleisberg cites his experience in the development of a global engineering network with sites in Germany, the United States and Japan. Before, each site had acted independently but must now act collaboratively as a global network.

“When we started to role out the new global organization and had global meetings, in the breaks all Japanese engineers would stand in one corner, the Americans in the next corner and the Germans in another one,” says Gleisberg. “At the end of our project, the electrical engineers from all three countries were in a discussion in one corner, the mechanical guys in the next one, etc. Here you could see the change in mind set we had achieved.”

Monitoring the Progress of Development

Overall, the external consultant plays a key role in helping the design engineer monitor the progress of development. “In all phases, the external consultants play a vital role in supporting the change management aspect,” says Gleisberg. “Any optimization project within the engineering environment typically [requires a person or persons] who [are] supportive in optimizing the existing organization and processes and also people who are openly or secretly working against any change. In order to ensure a certain dynamic to overcome the initial resistance against change, the consultant plays a critical role.”

Carl Smith, manufacturing solutions manager at IMAGINiT Technologies, says he believes the best approach to consulting for a complex design effort is to listen carefully. Initial fact finding and listening to client objectives and need is crucial in providing complex consulting.

“As consultants, we understand that addressing an engineering process involves folks that know the current practice and its problems from start to finish,” he says. “Even the best perceived solution is a waste of time if there isn’t adoption of the new strategy, so our strategic process and business analysis reviews are fact finding meetings that involve both group and individual interviews with the engineering team. Engineers tend to understand that the path from Point A to Point B can’t always be a straight line; a change request or order process, for example, can be extremely complex with multiple levels of approvals, responsibilities and tiers. Our job is to provide the best combination of technology and automation to streamline such a process.”

Smith adds that the fine art of simulation and modeling can create value for product development and process development for client needs. Simulating product ramifications is key in driving decisions about a product or project.

“We have a design simulation team that offers consulting services around CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and mechanical simulation where our clients will provide us with a baseline design and outline their design objective,” says Smith. “For example, the client might have goals for thermal performance for a product with an eye on optimizing product performance before beginning physical prototyping efforts. It is well documented in optimizing design with a digital prototype [and] far more efficient; our simulation consultants have extensive experience to guide and advise our clients with product development.”

Complex consulting speeds and improves product design and adds value. The New York Times’ Walker, in his perspective on design’s “golden age” expressed this sentiment well when he wrote “design has fundamentally changed the way we experience the world, from the way we interact with objects, to our expectations about how organizations are structured.”