With PDM as the foundation, a small engineering services firm has adapted lean principles to product design in an attempt to reduce waste, drive efficiencies, and deliver better value to customers.

When your business is providing engineering services, the mantra has to be all about delivering optimal value to customers. After all, you’re not only competing with other engineering services firms, you’re also up against low-cost overseas outsourcing providers and what might be the most formidable contender: a customer’s internal engineering team.

With customer value as a guiding principle, Inertia Engineering + Design (IE+D) set out from its inception in 2004 to be the small engineering services shop that leveraged big ideas to achieve its goals. Proven concepts such as concurrent engineering and lean principles serve as the foundation for IE+D’s product development philosophy. The 10-person firm also is aggressively leveraging sophisticated design platforms and collaboration tools, including product data management (PDM), in an effort to reduce waste and garner efficiencies as part of a broader strategy to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack.

The idea behind leveraging lean principles to create a different kind of design and engineering services shop was rooted in several early career experiences. Initially, as a process engineer at an injection molding plant, I was exposed to the principles of lean as they relate to the groundbreaking Toyota Production System. One of the company’s clients was Toyota, and the car giant’s operations team provided rigorous hands-on training in principles and methodologies such as time-and-motion studies, pull production systems, and visual manufacturing control systems as part of an effort to keep its vendor partners up to speed. With that training under my belt and with time spent in other engineering roles, it became clear that although there were many trained and knowledgeable experts willing to serve up engineering services, few were focused on the customer experience and even fewer were committed to delivering value.

PDM at the Core

With that in mind, IE+D’s charter was to apply lean principles to product development to create efficiencies and cut waste from the overall design process. As with any kind of transformative initiative, there was a need for some core building blocks. In this case, one of the key foundational elements is a PDM system, which serves as a central repository for all design data and project documentation. This ensures that everyone has access to the right version of the design no matter where he or she is located, greatly reducing the possibility for error and rework while facilitating greater reuse of parts and designs when and where it makes sense.

Along with version-control capabilities, the PDM system, in this case, the SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, is instrumental in facilitating standardization and automation, two other guiding principles of IE+D’s lean approach. Using the built-in workflow capabilities of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, IE+D is able to map out key business processes and workflows to ensure that the design process follows the same path every time, no matter where team members are located and regardless of the client. Using principles gleaned from the early Toyota Production System training, the team at IE+D generated standardized work procedures for every part of its design process, using the Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) standard widely embraced by the automotive industry as a base, with minor modifications to address some unique requirements.

The PDM system also facilitates automation, another tactic for wringing waste out of the product development process. Drawing on SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, IE+D has created templates and workflows around a number of common tasks so that information is populated automatically into documents and reports, eliminating the need for laborious data entry and at the same time reducing the possibility of errors.

Concurrent engineering, another core pillar of the IE+D design philosophy, also is enabled by the PDM platform. Because all the data and detailed drawings exist in a central repository with the proper version controls, IE+D engineers and design partners are able to move forward on other related tasks—for instance, simulating kinematics or creating final drawings—well before parts and assemblies are fully designed. Being able to perform key development milestones simultaneously compared with using a traditional serial approach garners huge efficiencies, allowing IE+D to serve its clients more effectively by helping them get products to market in a more timely fashion.

People, Process, Tools

Although PDM definitely lies at the heart of IE+D’s strategy, other tools and methods are used to foster collaboration between team members and clients and drive waste out of the design process. To optimize communications between far-flung teams and clients, IE+D employs Zoho Projects and Google Docs online project management applications. With these tools, team members can share and edit documents, get real-time dashboard status updates on project tasks, and collaborate through online chats or Web meetings.  Additionally, these online project management and collaboration tools allow our customers to participate more actively in our projects with full transparency about the work being done.

In keeping with IE+D’s core focus on customer value, the firm has taken steps to ensure that it can wring more out of its resources. IE+D has forged relationships with low-cost design and manufacturing partners in China and outsources manufacturing work there to reduce costs when appropriate while employing a small team of engineers to oversee projects. Another new tactic gleaned from lean manufacturing practices is a two-shift operation designed to improve productivity. One engineering team works the traditional shift from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the other on board from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.

For IE+D, the biggest challenge has been finding team members who are passionate about the directive around customer value and flexible enough to make the changes needed to allow for the continuous improvements that go along with lean practices. Even with the core PDM and collaboration tools, communication among extended teams can be tricky, especially when one takes into account the remote partners and the second shift.

To facilitate communication between personnel, IE&D has instituted a 15-minute “huddle meeting,” held daily at 3:33 p.m. ET, where both day and afternoon shift personnel exchange reports on work in progress and any problems. Second shift personnel also take 30 minutes to update their counterparts and solicit feedback. There are different routines for the China-based team. Engineers there conduct a daily 15-minute huddle with the director of operations, who is fluent in Chinese, via Skype, and tasks are assigned and tracked by using Zoho Projects.

For the offshore engineering team, IE&D’s strategy is to compartmentalize projects because real-time collaboration and communication becomes more difficult when workers are not in the same office. Typically, the offshore team will focus on manufacturing and assembly drawings as well as finite element analysis studies because these are labor-intensive projects that require a lower level of collaboration.

With its course set on lean engineering services, IE+D is delivering on its promise of supplying value to customers.  Thanks to PDM and the concurrent engineering practices, IE+D was able to help a customer design an industrial vacuum trailer (Figure 1) in less than eight weeks, a 50% decrease compared with traditional methods. The same scenario occurred with a project for a child car seat. By applying lean practices and leveraging the outsourcing and two-shift operations, the IE+D team slashed development time on the car seat by 30%.

Figure 1.

The QuickSider battery-powered urban delivery vehicle (Figure 2) is another telling example of how a focus on lean practices and collaboration pays off. As project lead, IE+D coordinated the design effort for its client, Unicell Ltd., a truck body manufacturer, along with close to a dozen other engineering contractors and specialists. Thanks to processes that support streamlined collaboration, IE+D was able to help reduce the development cycle for QuickSider on the order of 30 to 40%.

Figure 2.

These are all great examples of how lean practices deliver, but IE+D sees greater opportunity in honing its approach to delivering more value to customers while still making a profit. The goal is not to make lean practices an end point but to develop an ongoing strategy for continuous improvement.

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