I had a moment of “Eureka” about a month ago. It happened while I was thinking about the way people develop products. Product development is a tricky proposition, but you don’t need to take my word for it, many people have the battle scars to prove it or bald “project management” tires from constantly jamming on the brakes and then hitting the accelerator. You’ll understand what I mean by ‘flow is faster’.

It’s easy to describe the trance I was in when I had had my eureka moment. Anyone that’s traveled for business can picture the scene. I was vaguely watching a reality show, on one of the gazillion hotel cable channels, while checking email and reviewing a presentation I would be delivering the following morning. I settled on a commercial (probably had something to do with food), and waited for the regularly scheduled show to come back on. It was about five minutes into the program. To be honest, I can’t remember the shows name or what channel it was on, but it featured four highly skilled military experts as they competed in feats of strength, speed, and intelligence. By the end of the episode, and three challenges, there was one ultimate winner. The contestants all had very similar backgrounds and experience, except for one whom I’ll refer to as an old-timer. He was a 40 something retired Army Special Ops going up against three 20 something’s who looked ready to cause others pain. I remember thinking “I feel for you old man, but you’re going down…”

The first challenge was a multi-laser course. Each contestant had to crawl, walk, jump and sometimes flip through a series of laser beams. Then they had to hit a switch and repeat the whole process in reverse to get back to the starting line. The challenge was a little frustrating because if a contestant broke a laser beam it would set off an alarm and they would have to reset and start over. First up was old-timer and as I watched him take his time (and I mean Take. His. Time.). He took so much time they went to commercial and, to my surprise, when they came back from the break he finally finished; albeit with an unimpressive time of 4 plus minutes. I remember laughing out loud, as the course was not that long and I thought, “watch out old-timer, here come the young bucks…” I continued to watch and the most unexpected thing happened, time after time the young bucks tried to speed through the course. The faster they went, the quicker they would trip a laser and have to start over. When it was all said and done, old-timer was the fastest.

Here’s the part that made me drop my laptop and pay total attention to this crazy show. When they interviewed old-timer on his first win they asked him how he did it. He said, “flow is faster”. He actually said something like “smooth is faster” or “slow is faster”. More important though, was what he said next. It was something like “I slowed down, surveyed my obstacles and challenges, then I tried my best to prioritize my skill and capability. I knew I needed to keep the clock in mind, but my overall goal was to finish without error”. At this point I know I said “Holy Shit” out loud. I remember thinking that old-timer just explained product development! Flow is faster.

Think about what he said and think about the day-to-day challenges when developing products, engineering, and manufacturing. People are constantly trying to rush a change request or release something to the shop floor without verification. Time and time again companies try to produce a product only to find lead-time was atrocious and on-time-delivery is in jeopardy. Loopbacks, communication problems, pointing fingers, it all comes down to one simple thing, which I can guarantee isn’t easy. Flow. If you can map out and master the flow of your product development system and get everyone to take ownership and buy into a defined system, no short-cutting, and no panicked reactions, you will finish strong. Slow down, observe your obstacles and challenges, prioritize your skills and capabilities and keep an eye on the end goal. I’m confident that if you give it a chance you will find that “flow” really is faster, but you don’t need to take my word for it. Listen to the old-timer.

Flow is faster. He won the whole thing.

My name is Matt and I ride mopeds – I’m not talking about the scooters or step through motorcycles that you see cruising around cities and college these days, I mean mopeds. Small, typically old, motorized 2-wheeled vehicles that have moveable pedals allowing a person to pedal the moped like a bicycle if they a) run out of gas b) need to go ‘stealth’ c) don’t feel like push starting the ‘ped or d) feel like exercising. This post and hopefully a few more will follow my very own product development design process as I restore and customize one of my vintage mopeds – the Kreidler MP 19 pictured in the slideshow above and the image below. This post explains the process I went through after deciding the seat needed some attention.

I had planned to have the original seat reupholstered, but after removing the cover and the foam I noticed that there was a bit of rust on the metal seat pan as well as some cracks in vital areas.

The Design Process

After seeing the condition of the old seat pan I decided it was time for the old to become new.  Rather than purchasing a new seat, I decided to use what I do day-in and day-out at EAC. I would design one and the try to build it on my own. I like to think that I’m a pretty good engineer and I have all the Creo software tools, so the designing wasn’t going to be a problem, but this will be my first real metalworking project.

Step 1: Design

The first step in my design process was figuring out what I wanted my new seat to be. Do I want it hinged like the original or have it rigidly attached to the frame? Do I want to tuck the taillight under the rear fairing? What gauge metal should I use, etc.? After getting my requirements I continued to think of my metal working capabilities as well as the tools available. Realizing that I don’t have much firsthand experience in metal fabrication and only basic shop tools, hammers, bench vise, angle grinder, and a welder, I knew I had to keep the parts and the design simple.

After many hours (and beers) contemplating my requirements and fabrication abilities, it was time to sit down and design the new seat in Creo Parametric. Inside of Creo, I used the sheet metal functionality to design my metal parts. The sheet metal functionality allowed me to design the parts the way that they would be built. For example, start with a flat sheet in the shape of the base and add a couple of 90-degree walls. Then add a couple of rounds and corner cutouts to get the base of the seat.

The other sheet metal parts were created in a similar fashion as the base. I decided to mount the taillight under the rear fairing which meant I needed an assembly model to make sure everything would fit together. Modeling the seat and assembly up in 3D was a life-saver. It showed me the original angle on the rear fairing was too steep and would interfere with the taillight. I flattened out the angle and adjusted the location of the taillight to get the correct fit and look. Below you can see the final design process.

With the design work completed, it was time to make sure everything would work in real life so I made a prototype. To create my prototype I printed the flattened state of the sheet metal parts and traced them on cardboard.  A little cutting, bending, taping and voila, a prototype. Building a prototype is something we strongly encourage our customers to make.  It’s should be part of every product development project. It made it so I could ‘place’ my design on the moped. It allowed me to see that I needed to make the seat just a little longer and a little wider. The original design just didn’t look right on the moped. Also, the slightly larger seat will be much more comfortable while cruising around on the winter-torn roads.  After I updated the design it was time to start cutting and forming metal.

Step 2: Fabrication

With each flat pattern done I created an assembly with a part that was the size of the blank piece of sheet metal and then I assembled all of the flat patterns to the stock piece to make sure I had enough stock material to cut out all of the parts. Knowing that I had enough stock material I went and traced out the parts on the actual sheet metal and started cutting. I used an angle grinder to cut out my patterns because the material was a little too thick for tin snips.

With the parts cut out, I laid the flat patterns back over the cutouts and marked the bend lines so I knew where to start and stop the bends. That is another perk of using Creo’s sheet metal functionality. It shows you the start and stop locations for bends with dashed lines. See the following picture for the bend lines.

Now that everything was cut out and marked I needed something to hold the metal flange walls in order to bend them on the base. Thankfully we have a bench vise in the workshop. The only problem was that the walls on the long side were longer than the jaws on the vise. To get around this I took a couple of 2x4s and placed them in the jaws of the vise and the sheet metal between the 2x4s. The 2x4s provided two benefits, support along the entire edge of the bend as well as a nice round edge for the sheet metal to follow. Thankfully I was able to create the bends with just my hands and body weight.

For the rear fairing and the front edge, the radii of the bends were so large that I could not use the same setup used to create the bends on the base. What I did was I found a steel pipe with roughly a two-inch diameter and clamped it in the vise. I then roughly placed the middle of the bend on the center of the pipe and pressed down creating a bend/crease in the sheet metal and repeated this several times. When I had the general shape bent out in the design process I took a rubber mallet and used that to smooth out the bend. One thing to note about the rear fairing and the front edge is that I left extra material on the ends in order to have something to hold on to while bending the parts.

Once all of the sheet metal parts were cut and formed it was time to start welding them together.  Welding seemed a little daunting since the only other time I welded, about 7 years ago, I set my pants on fire. Thankfully I had a coworker teach me a little about welding before I started. I also practiced quite a bit on some spare material before I started. This helped me get the welder settings correct for the material thickness. With the welder dialed in, I made tack welds to hold the parts in place while I made sure they were exactly where I wanted them. Once each piece was in its proper place I started to weld it all together. After the parts were welded together I ground down to smooth any excess weld and then went back and filled in any voids and re-ground as necessary. It was a learning experience. It was kind of like “lather, rinse, repeat” only “weld, grind, repeat.”

Below are pictures of the seat during different times of assembly as well as the finished product on the moped.

Lessons Learned:

Throughout this design process, I learned a lot.  For one thing, you can do a lot more with a can-do attitude than you think. Another thing I learned was that welding is not as daunting as I thought. As with anything in life, it takes a little practice and patience. Prototypes are amazing. They may cost some time and or money but they are worth it.  If I did not make a cardboard prototype in my design process I would have had a seat that was just a little too short and I would have had to remake the seat from scratch once it was finished. The sheet metal functionality in Creo Parametric is fantastic and really does work.  The bend lines on the flat patterns helped immensely to create accurate parts. One other thing I learned throughout the design process was that on my next project I need to take a lot more pictures along the way.

I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures of the finished product (minus paint and a little bit of leather and foam). Until next time…

When contemplating the idea of writing a blog, I challenged myself to justify why it would be both worth my time to write, and worth yours to read. The hope is that working through self-justification will result in a blog of greater interest and value.

Sharing the motives behind this blog through self-introduction seems the right place to start.  By self-introduction, I don’t mean telling you about myself — you can find all that on LinkedIn — but rather about EAC and our shared view of product development. EAC was founded and operates on a fundamental belief that the way we (you) execute product development is fundamentally flawed.  We further believe that this deteriorates America’s competitive position and unnecessarily, unacceptably demotivates the expert knowledge workers who operate within the functions critical to product success.

As an achievement-focused organization, EAC seeks first to understand the drivers and root causes of the positive and negative behaviors typical of product development environments. We then engage in the competition of ideas to produce an array of countermeasures to bring to common product development problems. One output of this internal collaboration is the Product Development Operating System (PDOS), a framework for the conduct of successful product development published on the EAC website.

An element of the PDOS gets to the heart of justifying this blog. In the PDOS, we use a maturity model to articulate an important aspect of improvement efforts within product development. Limited by flawed management habits many companies become trapped at what we call Level 2 operation, “Silo’ed”. During the maturation of a product development system, the gap from Level 2 to Level 3, “Systematic”, is the most difficult to bridge. It is EAC’s mission to help product development organizations, to borrow a phrase, cross this chasm.

Siloes are interesting. In companies, they are at first a sign of progress. The generalist of entrepreneurship reforms into specialized functional areas, enabling further growth and maturation.  But they eventually become a barrier to further organizational progress. That’s not surprising; Peter Senge tells us in the first law of systems thinking that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions”. For these maturing companies, getting beyond the silo mentality is one important key to progress.

Earlier in my career, I spent several years working in Japan at a global manufacturing company.   Japan during the course of its history had periodically shut itself off from the rest of the world. The Japanese talked about their resulting global naivety — knowing and caring about only what happened within their limited domain – as ‘ii no kaeru’, a ‘frog in a well’. A well is just an upside down silo. For functional groups, understanding their own bigger picture – the landscape in which the well or silo exists – is the first step in the work of connecting the silos and fostering systematic operation.

EAC conducts Voice-of-Customer interviews, performs Product Development System Assessments, and provides consulting services. During these events, when we visit prospects and customers, it is startling to see how hungry each company’s product development thought leaders are for stimulating and informative ideas and discussions about what can be done to improve product development operation. And that is how we justify this blog. To all of you who from time to time feel like a frog, this blog is aimed at letting you know what’s going on outside of your well.

You may or may not have heard of the term Extensioneering. We believe it was coined by one of our customers when he explained how we work with his internal engineering team. We literally became an extension of his group. Little did we know at the time, but it says a lot about how the Design and Engineering group at EAC approaches projects and working relationships with customers.

We now like to refer to what we do as ‘Extensioneering’ rather than consulting or outsourcing as these terms tend to have a stigma attached to them.

Outsourcing your Engineering Projects

In reality, what do you think of when you hear outsourcing;

• Why would I let someone else do my work?
• I don’t want to tell someone how to do it or explain what I need when I can do it myself.
• They won’t get it right.
• Outsource… doesn’t that mean to send it off to China or overseas?
• Toss it over the wall and see what comes back.

Some of the comments or statements may be true in certain situations. Some of these ideas stem from poor experiences in the past. And the worst may just be due to job security. Most of the bad rap that outsourcing or consulting gets is due to poorly set expectations. You should never have to lower the expectations of what you will be getting from your outsource partner, but do discuss expectations with them from the onset before any work is actually performed.  Doing this early will ensure you get a project completed and the deliverables will meet your needs.

I can’t tell you that outsourcing or extensioneering is the right solution for your company or project and I would like to tell you to send all your overflow, R&D type of projects to us (this is what we do) but that’s not the point of this post.

Design and Engineer Outsourcing Options

So here are some simple things to think about when choosing a design outsource (Extensioneering) partner;

• What is the communication schedule that you will have on the project?
• How responsive were they when you approached them on the project?
• In the discussion of the project, were they truly interested in the project? Will they provide some amount of potential education back to you (if needed) or vice versa?
• How many resources can be applied, both from your company and the potential design partner?
• What have they worked on before  It’s not always a bad thing if they haven’t done “what you do”. This allows for some out of the box thinking and fresh approaches.
• What software is to be used? Not just the CAD, but the data and project management aspect as well.
• What is the expected timeline for the project? Remember that the design partner schedule may also be dependent on what you can provide them in regards to communication and reviews.

Check out more about our Design and Engineering Services here.