Product development can be time consuming, difficult to manage, and slow to get up and running. Luckily, EAC Engineering Services is here to help transform the way you design your products. We offer a number of services to help you reduce time-to-market and improve project management to complete more projects. We can help with everything from customized mentoring to acting as your entire engineering team.
Milestone AV Technologies was in a position in which engineering resources were being fully utilized on active projects but they needed to make progress on a project that had been prototyped but stalled for nearly a year. Their solution? Find a trusted partner to deliver a thorough and mature design.
Milestone AV Technologies selected EAC as their trusted partner to deliver engineering and design services as well as manage the project.
Mike Ardito, Director of Product Development at Milestone AV Technologies said that in the little amount of time EAC Design Engineers worked on the project, they advanced it significantly. The level of maturity in the design exceeded his expectations.
“The first thing that was really evident when we started [working together] was that [EAC’s Design Engineer] was being very diligent from an engineering standpoint. We set up weekly meetings to check in, to give guidance, see what he was doing, and answer questions. It was clear that he was doing a lot of upfront work that would inform the design later. The engineering rigor and the quality of engineering work and the technical work, I got the impression was very good and the diligence was very high.”
Milestone needed to maintain critical client relationships by completing the project on-time and within budget. Leveraging the partnership with EAC allowed them to do exactly that. The project was completed on-time and within 10% of budget.
Like many companies, Milestone prefers to keep project work internal. However, if the opportunity presented itself, Ardito said he would have no issues coming back to EAC to based on his first experience with EAC.
Ardito explained that they look to outside design firms because they don’t have the internal resources available to manage the project but still want to move forward with it. He said “the worst possible case would be to go to somebody to do the external work and then have to spend a lot on internal resources managing that work.” He also explained that working with EAC, he was comfortable because he knew the project was in good hands and he would receive a quality output.
It was the first time Milestone AV Technologies reached out to another design firm in over a year. Ardito said, “The most valuable part of partnering with EAC goes back to having faith very early on that the technical rigor and detail was being addressed. I was assured that the EAC team was going to do the diligence necessary to create a good design.”
Milestone AV Technologies was able to complete a critical project 40% (8 months) faster by leveraging EAC’s Engineering Services group. Ardito explained that realistically, due to their workload they wouldn’t have been able to work on this project until the first quarter of 2016; EAC was able to deliver this project to them in October of 2015.
Ardito’s final comment was, “The level of service [EAC] provided, in terms of being available, the amount of attention EAC gave to the project before, during, and after was very good. It wasn’t the kind of thing where ‘we won this contract so we’re going to slap it out and not really follow up and make sure the customer is happy.’ It was just the right way to do business.”
When is PDSA season?
We all know when it’s cold and flu season and what precautions to take to get back to health or at least dial down the symptoms. However, do we recognize when it’s time to conduct a Product Development System Assessment (PDSA) to get our organization back to health?
To analogize a real life situation, if someone is sick and goes to the doctor, the doctor would want to treat the immediate sickness and then propose a physical to determine what else is going on within the patient’s body. The doctor then sets a diagnosis for continuous improvement of health. A PDSA lends itself to something close to this from a product development standpoint.
An organization must first acknowledge a problem from a department stakeholder (i.e: Vice President, Director, Manager). They must obtain an understanding of how this problem effects downstream departments and create a sense of urgency that this one problem, is only one problem, and more problems are likely to be a major inhibitor to reaching goals.
Sure, organizations can operate with these inefficiencies and still make products, but we want them to know that they could make even more products or run more projects by taking part in a PDSA, which is when we come in to align an organization’s goals and measure achievement recognition through a secure and obtainable continuous improvement plan. PDSA’s are our way of measuring an organizations pain in their processes and providing a long-term solution to provide continuous improvement and maintain a healthy organization.
PDSA’s are the only way for EAC to truly understand the heartbeat of a company and the only way a customer or prospect can become a partner. Their goals become our goals for that organization.
Why would you want a PDSA?
PDSA’s are valuable for two reasons. First we, EAC, help clients to see their product development operation as a system which is a critical first step in making the operation better (i.e. more systematic). Secondly, we provide, as the output of the assessment, a set of high leverage improvement initiatives that will directly lead to increased productivity of their product development system.
Organizations may know something is not right with their product development operation – maybe for instance due to the number of recurring fires they fight – but they don’t know where to focus their improvement initiatives until they learn to see their operation as a system as opposed to a process.
The PDSA aligns a company’s business strategies and objectives to product development initiatives to determine areas of improvement. This is so valuable to be able to motivate a company or the internal champion to see how an improvement to a product development system would be tied to or contribute to a portion of the company’s objectives.
For example, an organizations objective or value opportunity is to reduce product development cost. Then we would streamline the product development system by making sure the people, process, and technology within a product development process are all working together without disrupting another part of the product development process thus taking waste out of the system enables reduction in cost.
During a PDSA, we engage with multifunctional groups within a company to extract process information and where waste is. Over and above that, a continuous improvement strategy will be set in place for the company to achieve the desired state or desired maturity level. Without an investment in continuous improvement, a one-time fix to a process or system will not sustain in the long term.
What’s so great about PDSA’s?
PDSA’s are learning events and EAC consultants learn something new with every PDSA because of the uniqueness of each client we work with. Beyond spreading our understanding of seeing operations as systems, it is exciting to be able to learn the details of the client’s operations and then provide critical improvement information.
The ability to tell an internal champion or the economic buyer that their organization is “leaking oil” or specifically being able to quantify to them the dollars being wasted, and that we, EAC are here to help reduce that and get them in a better state excites me. The ability to whiteboard the organizations processes and ask them why they would perform a certain task in that fashion. The ability to ask the tough questions, like “what is the biggest headache or challenge they have right now?” and “what is working well for you?” The ability to help the champion to present to their executive board is what is rewarding in the end.
We live and breathe to make a difference for our customers. PDSA’s are a mental marathon that test every part of a person’s attention to detail, savvy, note taking, and overall listening abilities. The challenge is what we get revved up for. We never know what we are going to find.
We’ve been talking about system archetypes and will focus on that topic again in this post. We’re going to look at the system archetype called “Shifting the Burden.” First, a little review. A system archetype is a system that recurs over and over in many different settings and industries.
Shifting the Burden centers around shifting the burden from solving a problem to solving a symptom. It starts with the awareness of a problem. The awareness comes from the observation of some symptom of that problem. At the point of observation you have a choice. You can either choose to put out the fire and resolve the symptom, or you can do a more protracted problem solving exercise and get to the root-cause and solve the problem. Under the time constraints of modern business we oftentimes choose the former and put out the fire. We measure success using the fact that the symptom goes away and we can get back to our urgent regular work.
Shifting the burden from solving a problem to solving a symptom results in an addiction cycle. We treat the symptom and, because we haven’t solved the problem, the problem recurs as a fire. As we rely more on solving symptoms instead of problems, more and more fires recur and we find ourselves in perpetual firefighting. As we are perpetually firefighting we have less time to spend on solving problems so we’re more inclined to solve symptoms. As we do this, our ability to actually root-cause problems and solve them at their root atrophies. It is a side affect of the addiction cycle.
For example, say you have a customer service group. Let’s say that over the course of the last three months the number of calls into the call center has increased by 25% and the customer service groups is suffering low morale because of it–long hours and hostile customers. The problem at this point really is unknown. No one has investigated it. It could be as simple as an unclear instruction manual for a new product that’s been released. But, in the interest in getting the call center morale problem resolved the company invests in capacity for the call center. With more people in the call center morale improves and the symptom goes away, but the underlying problem remains…probably to recur at some point in the near future.
The “Shifting the Burden” archetype has an antidote. The antidote is to recognize when you’re applying Band-Aids–to recognize when you’re just solving the symptom–and to follow up that with a deep root-cause problem solving exercise. Of course, to be able to do this, you need a competency and capability of solving root-cause problems. This could be PDCA or, as EAC promotes, the LAMDA learning cycle.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive. Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
We’re habitual beings. We tend to do things the way we’ve always done them. I want to write about specifications in that context today. A lot of the organizations we work with utilize a specification sheet or template in to which a fill-in-the-blanks exercise is executed to create a spec sheet and communicate design intent to engineering. The problem with boilerplate templated spec sheets is they don’t distinguish the value that differentiate one spec from another —e.g. which spec is important, less important, arbitrary, etc.
A way of dealing with that issue is to divide your specifications into three categories: Musts, Coulds, and Shoulds. The Musts are those requirements that without which you don’t have a product. Without them you don’t have a competitive position in the marketplace. The Shoulds are the things on which your competitive advantage is built; things you’re trying to accomplish in your value proposition. The Coulds are things that would enhance the value of your product, but may not be worth focusing on and investing efforts to achieve.
These three categories still could be communicated as point specifications, but we can increase the value and information being communicated by expressing them differently. One way would be expressing them as ranges. Instead of having a point spec you then have a range of values. Hitting any of the points within that range would provide value as perceived by the market place. Those ranges can be communicated to the engineer and used to guide whether they reached sufficiency in their design effort.
You can take these ranges and enhance them further and make them communicate better information by placing them beside a graph to show how the market value will change over the range. That way an engineer can see that they’ve achieved the target, but with a little more effort they can achieve more value. It’s meaningful information to them for their design.
The third way of communicating the Should to engineering would be as goals, as word/statement based ideas of what you’re trying to accomplish with a particular design. The communication of goals takes this point focus defined by specifications and opens it up broadly — bounded only by conceptual boundaries defined by the goals.
The communication of Shoulds as goals allows the focus to shift from achievement of various points to the generation of new knowledge and looking for alternative ways of solving a technical problem. It allows us to rethink the very nature of how we manage engineering and product development. It also frees us from the pain and misery of testing to spec – pass/fail testing – to testing for knowledge and learning. And this knowledge that we gain from testing a full range of technology allows us to capture and apply knowledge as innovation within product design.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
If you’re familiar with the world of Lean, then you’ve probably heard the expression “it’s a journey.” This expression has become a little trivial or trite. It’s become a little hollowed out, sort of like the term empowerment or win-win. I have a colleague who hates the expression win-win. He hates it because it is always used as a mask when he finds himself in a win-lose situation. But Lean really is a journey and I want to articulate the elements of that journey for you today.
First, you need to define your starting point, like a journey. Then you define a destination or where you want to go. Finally you have a rate of progress towards your destination. So, if you’re traveling from New York to California, you have your starting point in NY and your destination in CA. You have your rate of progress that includes intermediate states. You might stop in PA and visit some friends. You might only have enough money to get to IN. If that’s the case then you’ll need to stop and make some money for a little while before you pack up and continue west as far as you can go. California represents the ideal state and you have some intermediary states along the way.
In the world of Lean you define the current state, you consider your ideal state, you understand your limits, you identify targeted improvement states — way stations along the way, you go there and reach a steady state, then you prepare the next move on your continuous journey when the time is right. And that’s how Lean is represented as a journey.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
In the 9 years that I’ve been in some type of a sales or sales support role at EAC I’ve noticed some common themes across the companies that I’ve been exposed to. One of which that continues to intrigue me is a correlation — companies with open minds that are willing to meet with a sales person seem to be doing better than those that don’t.
You may call me out on this but I’ve had exposure to several hundred executive level individuals and those that seem to do well are willing to let a sales person give their pitch. Part of being a sales professional is dealing with rejection. It happens daily and is tough, but you learn from it and get better. My experience has been that companies who reject a 20-minute meeting are those that are struggling to meet goals, have stagnant growth, are over worked, and generally have bad employee morale.
One positive example is an individual that is a VP of a billion dollar company. From our very first call he showed a level of interest and respect for me. It was refreshing to have him demonstrate genuine interest in what I had to offer. It all started with a 20-minute meeting and now EAC is significantly impacting how they bring their products to market. In the 8 months that I’ve worked with him he’s been promoted twice.
Another example that comes to mind is a VP of a 50 million dollar company that will take a call from me even when he is in a meeting. He is excited to hear what I have to say and values my input. What a way to make a sales person feel appreciated and important, and that naturally makes me go out of my way to help him out when he’s in a bind. He is a true pleasure to work with and guess what; his company is growing like crazy!
Now for the counterpoint…there is a company I’ve tried to work with for years. They offer a specialized commodity that is very sensitive to any type of economic decline. During the great recession they let go over 80% of their employees. Surprisingly they are still in business, but are struggling to provide enough work to support their overhead. While a VP was willing to take an initial meeting with me, he is very close minded to any type of change and has no interest in finding new ways to get better. “I’m too busy to make any changes.” And guess what, he’s pretty grumpy.
I often think of the cartoon where a polished sales guy shows up to a meeting with a soldier. He’s carrying a machine gun in his bag but the soldier carrying a sword responds with “No, I don’t have time to see a crazy salesman — I’ve got a battle to fight!”
Our world is changing rapidly, especially as we continue with the economic recovery. Our customers are constantly facing stricter deadlines, increased competition, and more complex requirements that are always changing. “We have to hit the deadline or we risk losing the customer.” Too often I see companies throwing money and resources at fixing a problem because that’s the way they’ve always done it. And then they wonder why they struggle with growth, profitability, and product performance issues. Well I have some good news…there is a better way. And the next sales person to contact you may have a solution to the problem that is keeping you up at night. Give them a chance.
