Three Ways To Vet Your Engineering Consultant
New product development often follows a generic six- or seven-stage model, which has been reinforced across the internet and is widely considered a standard practice.
However, this framework is only relevant for certain markets, including consumer goods and software development. In these models, the entire engineering effort is reduced to a step called “product development.”
For products with development cycles that lead to public availability within weeks, a process like this may make sense. But those who depend on heavy equipment and machinery know that something more robust must be accounted for in the engineering process — unless you want your product to behave like a disposable consumer good.
Your Engineering Consultant’s Product Design Process Is Worth Scrutinizing
When your company is planning to develop equipment, you want to ensure that the development process is not oversimplified. Although you don’t have any tolerance for risk in the field, a less comprehensive engineering process can expose your products to equipment failure.
Your product development and design engineers must go beyond the typical product design process. Go further by asking them to detail their process specifically. This will help you determine:
- Depth of experience: A team with significant experience doesn’t rely on a boilerplate development template, and certainly not one from a textbook or an online resource. Excellent product development comes from learning how to implement the appropriate tasks at the right time because the team has learned what leads to successful outcomes.
- Thoroughness: The willingness to go above and beyond for clients to prepare their products for manufacturing differentiates the service-centric teams from those who aren’t thinking about their clients’ best interests first.
- Engineering discipline: Seeing a product through a full product design process requires technical knowledge and a commitment to quality workmanship. A disciplined approach ensures excellent outcomes.
To deliver their best work, leading North American engineering teams use an eight-stage product design model. We’ve identified three aspects of this product design process that will quickly reveal whether your prospective engineering team can design with expertise, thoroughness, and discipline in mind.
Discovery Before Product Design
Discovery is where significant ground gets covered and key details emerge that would never be uncovered otherwise. Understanding a product’s fundamentals is an essential part of successful engineering. When improperly implemented or ignored altogether, you run the risk of an expensive redesign downstream.
Your engineering team should operate from first principles. First principles thinking refers to the act of identifying the basic facts about a product’s physics, materials, and mechanics to understand what is true about a given problem and the engineering required to solve it. To understand the best approach to design, an engineering team must ask what, how, when, where, and why a product is used to understand duty cycles, codes, operating realities, environments, and more.
However, some teams rely on shortcuts. They model design work after other projects, which may look good on paper, but do not always lead to performance in the field. If your engineering team has trouble articulating the fundamentals that shape the problem your product is trying to solve, the design they deliver will be a copy of someone else’s answer to a question you may not be asking.
Iterative Analysis During Product Design
The conventional approach to product design treats finite element analysis (FEA) and hand calculations as final validation steps. Too often, engineers rely on a “build, then check” approach. On paper, this would seem to make sense, yet it can create project challenges and erode a successful deliverable.
How a project begins determines its fate. Early design decisions are the features that every later addition is built upon. Difficulties can emerge when assumptions about load path, clearances, or other factors are incorrectly analyzed and accounted for. Yet, as an engineering team moves forward, these issues may not reveal themselves until it is far too late in the process. You hired your engineering team to provide a turnkey service. You didn’t expect reworks and redesigns.
A disciplined product development and design engineering team avoids costly errors by running analysis throughout the design process. Preliminary FEA and targeted hand calculations are performed as features are developed, catching problems while they are still inexpensive to adjust. By the time formal validation is run at the end, the team should find itself confirming what it already knows, not validating for the first time.
An approach to analysis that is deeply integrated throughout an engineering team’s process is worth trusting.
Your Chosen Engineering Firm’s Prototyping Strategy
Today’s engineering technology allows a manufacturer perform virtual prototyping and to cut and machine directly from a 3-D CAD model. Due to this capability, many assume that the first physical prototype will be flawless. However, this stands in direct contrast to the purpose of prototyping.
A physical prototype reveals any final gaps between the current design and its behavior in the field. It lets engineers confirm ther virtual load assumption, identify fit issues, assembly problems, tolerance or load challenges, and more. The prototyping phase is another check against discovering issues in the field.
A highly skilled engineering consultant uses virtual and physical prototyping to understand and close these gaps before a production product is built. Some firms may even work with their clients and partners to support and monitor a physical prototype build.
Consider avoiding a product development and design service team that talks about prototyping through a pass/fail lens. Alternatively, vet and select a team that treats prototyping as a test of design assumptions up to that point, to validate assumptions or reveal and solve any remaining challenges during that process.
Vetting a Product Design Team Is Simpler Than It Seems
Although the three characteristics we’ve explored differentiate stronger engineering teams from the rest, they really shouldn’t be so rare. If you think about each one plainly, they follow engineering logic quite well:
- Start from first principles and determine requirements.
- Use FEA and other virtual prototyping techniques to analyze mechanics.
- Treat a physical prototype as a test of design assumptions up to that point.
None of this is unusual, yet it takes some effort to find a team that has the experience and discipline to provide this approach in a careful, measured, and systematic way.
If you’ve found a product development and design engineering team that can create the kind of heavy equipment or machinery you produce, shift the conversation over to product design. See if their outsourcing model and approach to product development are grounded in the kind of engineering acumen we’ve been describing.
The questions you need to ask are simple, but the payoff can be significant.
