Slow Hand, On Demand

By Paul Goossens

Desktop Engineering’s Managing Editor Jamie Gooch’s editorial in the March issue, “Engineering Help Wanted,” prompted me to share how many of the factors he describes have affected our own service business. To give this some context, Maplesoft has been developing tools for model-based design (MBD) and analysis for 25 years. But it has become increasingly apparent that the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, when an engineering software company could pump out new products for consumption by a technology-starved market, are long over. Engineers are now drowning in “productivity tools.” They are now much more interested in a complete solution than “better technology.”

This has led us to provide a service offering as a complement to our tools—training, application development, through to development of turnkey solutions. It’s a concept that has worked well for us over the last decade.

However, in the last year or so, we have seen an explosion in demand for our services, to the point where our technologies are almost secondary to delivering the solution. Clients have an engineering problem, they need to solve it quickly and they really don’t care what technologies are used to do it. Many of the driving forces in Jamie’s article have contributed to this increased demand; the fact this has happened over the last couple of years as the economy starts to recover from the “Great Recession” has certainly been a major factor. There is now a major skills shortage in our business area that is very difficult to reacquire.

But there are other factors at play to consider. Global competitive pressures are forcing many engineering companies to re-evaluate their own design practices to improve product reliability, speed up time-to-market and, of course, reduce costs. They are now learning lessons from industries that have managed to achieve this—in particular the aerospace and automotive industries—which have been the main adopters of many technologically driven design practices such as MBD. The ability to develop high-fidelity “virtual” prototypes to help identify and address design flaws has been a major accelerator within their design processes. Other industries are also beginning to incorporate MBD—and tools like ours—into their own processes. Of course, it’s one thing to have the tools to do this, but it is another to have the skill set to implement them.

Advanced Tools Require Training

The good news for late adopters of any technology is that all the mistakes have been made, and most have been fixed. This is particularly true for MBD tools, where engineers can now access enormous mathematical power through intuitive, polished and robust user interfaces. However, even with advanced tools that ease the process, the development of engineering system models still requires highly skilled people to carry it out. Developing that skill set takes training, and concentrated, sustained effort on a wide range of applications.

To use a musical analogy: A guitar, no matter how expensive, is just a tool. It is relatively easy to learn some scales and chords to play it somewhat competently, but it takes years of intense practice to play anything like Eric “Slowhand” Clapton.

Because developing simulations of their designs is only part of what they do, many engineers struggle to find the “practice time” they need to be fully competent. Fortunately for them, companies like ours that offer such a specialized service are able to develop the virtuoso-level skills that can only come from constant activity in their chosen fields over a wide range of applications.

To touch on another of Jamie’s points, paying for this level of skill for the duration of a project, and not when it isn’t needed, is very attractive to many engineering managers. This is the main reason why clients are engaging us in increasing numbers. Of course, this introduces a whole new set of business issues in terms of defining projects, and bringing them to a successful conclusion. But success of a project, we have learned, is not just about satisfying the client: We have to aim for delight. This is as much about trust-building and managing expectations as developing the Statement of Work. (But that’s a topic for another discussion!)

Paul Goossens is vice president, applications engineering for Maplesoft. Send e-mail about this article to [email protected].