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2022
- Thread starter RandyM
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Professional engineers can, if management gets out of the way. One company I worked for was developing a new product. It was a modem for a dot matrix printer. This was long before the internet and small computers. If you wanted to connect to a computer, you dialed in to a mainframe. Part of the product was a touchtone pad allowing the operator to dial out. Management put sales in charge. The first group to view the prototype decided that the touchtone pad could be accidentally dialed with an elbow. One of the salesmen demonstrated how and mandated a pad that prevented such an occurrence. A new pad was built with a hole for each button. No more "elbow dialing". The second group complained that the holes were too small. One fat fingered salesman decided that a different touchtone pad had to be used. Various other delays were introduced as each dog tried to hike his leg to the tree. In the end, by the time management mandated a release to stop the project from hemorrhaging money, there were other machines on the market doing the same thing. What could have been the first was just another "also ran". Management never really understood why. Sales was left in control, and the company's assets were sold off a couple of years later.
Unfortunately, Sales and Marketing are too often the major influence in new product design. Their time frame is based on having the product for the next trade show rather than based on realism. Projected MSRP's are based on sales expectations rather than realistic production costs and product design is driven by those expectations.
In one case, I designed a specialty component that required a precision bore glass tube. I specified a thicker wall tube with a section of the O.D. ground to fit a custom fitting. In a design review, the design was shot down in favor of a thinner wall tube which would fit our custom fitting without grinding. It saved $5 per assembly and 96 of these assemblies were used in the final product resulting in a savings of $500. The powers that be decided that, after applying their margin, that it would increase the cost too greatly.
To make the long story short, the company went with the cheaper design, resulting in a 20% breakage during manufacturing and repairs in the field because of breakage requiring a factory service person at a cost of around $10K. What could have been a blockbuster breakthrough product is limping along ten years later because of unreliability.
We had a saying in product development, "cost, features, time; pick any two".
In one case, I designed a specialty component that required a precision bore glass tube. I specified a thicker wall tube with a section of the O.D. ground to fit a custom fitting. In a design review, the design was shot down in favor of a thinner wall tube which would fit our custom fitting without grinding. It saved $5 per assembly and 96 of these assemblies were used in the final product resulting in a savings of $500. The powers that be decided that, after applying their margin, that it would increase the cost too greatly.
To make the long story short, the company went with the cheaper design, resulting in a 20% breakage during manufacturing and repairs in the field because of breakage requiring a factory service person at a cost of around $10K. What could have been a blockbuster breakthrough product is limping along ten years later because of unreliability.
We had a saying in product development, "cost, features, time; pick any two".
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