Alignex Mechanical Division Sales & Marketing Blog

Innovate or Evaporate

I have been fortunate to be in the business of working with and helping various companies for nearly the last 20 years.  In the spirit of partnership, I want to start sharing info I have come across with people like you.  My goal is to have a monthly blog entry by ME that has valuable info that may interest you.  The idea is that its something quick that should not take more than minute for your review.

I recently participated in a study conducted by the Aberdeen Group on Best-in-Class performance of engineering organizations and the strategies they employ.  They published a paper titled "The Engineering Executive's Strategic Agenda - Designing for the Enterprise and the Environment".

You can read the article here: http://aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/4902-RA-engineering-executive-strategic-agenda.asp

Some key takeaways I found in the article included:

Top 3 pressures executives are faced with:

• Shrinking development schedules is the top pressure (60%)
• Rising raw material costs (33%)
• Decreasing product price-points (28%)

Best-in-Class Performance
Companies today fall in 3 basic tiers,  the top 20% (Best-in-Class), the middle 50% (Industry Average) and the bottom 30% (Laggard). 

The criteria was based on:

• The percentage of their products that meet the release to manufacturing target dates
• Customer or market requirements
• Product cost targets
• Engineering phase development costs

Strategies of the Best-in-Class
What are the Best-in-class doing differently?

• Assessing product performance early
• Capturing and redeploying engineering knowledge
• Designing in a modular fashion
• Developing plans to protect intellectual property
• Deploying lean principles to their organization

Required Actions to achieve Best-in-Class performance
Organizations must:

• Assess product performance digitally in the design phase with simulation and analysis applications
• Correlate simulation and test results with computer aided technology applications
• Assess product regulatory compliance, quality, serviceability, and cost with specialty applications and plug-ins
• Create, track, and manage interfaces as well as map requirements and product capabilities down to subsystems and  subassemblies
• Deploy Lean methodologies in the engineering organization to gain operational efficiencies

At Alignex, we have been helping companies achieve best in class performance for decades.  If you or a colleague have been tasked to make improvements in any of these areas I would welcome the opportunity for us to discuss how we can help with a free consultation and analysis of your current operations.  I look forward to discovering the possibilities!

Mike Lamora
Email: mlam@alignex.com