No more distractions, please! 45% of our time is already spent on admin. If you\u2019re the average engineer, that is.<\/p>\n
Techconsult, a German-based analyst firm has just found that almost half of the engineering time of any manufacturing company is spent feeding systems and re-entering data. So it\u2019s no surprise that economists are scratching their heads trying to explain why productivity is declining, despite constantly increasing investments in IT systems.<\/p>\n
We asked Techconsult to look into this, so they spoke to more than 150 engineering managers to find out where the problem lies. The answer: The complexity of products and processes is increasing, putting engineering productivity under pressure. Design re06use seems to be a viable solution, but the managers doubt that the available systems will help them.<\/p>\n
This is bad news \u2013 but it gets worse. In the information age, the common cure for any problem is to throw a piece of software at it. In the case of engineering, the consensus was: Map the product development process in a system, manage the design data, and this will solve the issue. But the survey data doesn\u2019t bear this out, finding that 77% of engineering decision-makers expect to gain no positive productivity effects from a PLM system.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, I\u2019m not surprised by this outcome (though I was expecting a little more positivity). But it is completely in line with my day-to-day customer experience. From the Zuken perspective, it has always been an issue that the workflows and requirements of electrical and electronics engineering were not covered by PLM systems, opening a dangerous gap where there should be a seamless cross-discipline flow of design data and process information.<\/p>\n
So, is there any good news here? There is, and it comes in a clear statement from the engineering managers surveyed by Techconsult: 78% believe there is value in dedicated design data management for electrical and electronics engineering, tightly integrated with a PLM system (and equally tightly integrated into the ECAD system, I would add). This is what we call domain data management at Zuken. It\u2019s just a fancy term for electrical and electronics engineers managing their own data and workflow from within their own tools. It’s something we\u2019ve been doing for electronics engineers for a long time, but now we\u2019re making it truly cross-discipline by adding a dedicated tool for electrical engineers, with DS-E3<\/a>.<\/p>\n We knew the need was there, and we had an idea that companies were beginning to understand where the gaps lay in their systems, but as Robert Heinlein said: “Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.” I guess the time for domain data management has come. Finally.<\/p>\n Find out more at www.zuken.com\/edm<\/a>\u00a0or watch our new movie<\/strong><\/p>\n