It’s a very fine art of balancing - akin to tight rope walking when it comes Optimal features of a product and its safety V/s overengineering.
Overengineering can be a killer for Sales teams in pursuit of a sales opportunity who often sulk at not being competitive in the market. The contrarian view of this is that of a design engineer who often succumb to the temptations of playing it safe with the adoption of legacy designs. “Proven design, time tested, we have always used this design! “are what we often hear where our designers take refuge.
The result can however of such a dilemma or dead lock can have disastrous consequences for any management of a manufacturing industry. A lost order for not being price competitive. We at Vidhaatri Technologies too were not immune to these fallacies of proven design, safety, customer is used to this etc. It was time for intervention & here is what we did.
We chose one particular product family of ours called Freight Lifts and put up a frame work in place that prevented over engineering over time & rendered us price competitive in the market. It was a very structured framework / methodology put in place. I will restrict myself to the non-technical aspects of this framework and not reveal the highly technical ones since I am bound by IP protection. The framework had multiple elements as we called it. Elements that were clearly measurable & elements that were measurable with subjectivity in the context of its application. Each element was assigned a weightage factor & measured over a time period of 6 months (KANBAN Project) before we concluded on the results and the path forward. Some elements while managerial in nature, most elements were technical. Here are a few snapshots of the managerial elements with an insight into the Then & Now:
Crystal Clear view of the Product application:
Then: Most often these were repeat enquires from customers. The tendency was to simply dwell on the previous designs without understanding in greater detail the products application & the environment of its operation
Now: Technical sales in real sense is not just limited to generating interest & acquisition of business from the market eco-system just out of our product catalogues & brochures. It meant a deep understanding of the application need & its environment at customer premises. Sizing the right product in consultation with design at the sales cycle stage itself. Next was to peculation of this acquired knowledge to all internal functions for vertical integrations. Primarily to departments like procurement, assembly & installation teams.
Enhancing the design time:
One of the key deciding factors that customers use in decision making is the delivery time lines. Being cognizant of this aspect & yet allowing for additional design time meant methodically shrinking timelines at other departments to allow for this additional design time
Then: The designers were most often under tremendous pressure to release drawings for onward functions – procurement, manufacturing. Now, with this backdrop it was easier to fall prey into dwelling into past similar designs & replicate them or retrofit them to this point in case. It happens every where in the manufacturing industry & highly prevalent.
Now: First case is point was to allow for additional design time
Second case in point was to scientifically dwell on certain mandatory sub-elements as we called it under design. As an example, calculation of load bearing capacity of guide rails dependent on actual load bearing capacity rather than dwelling in the past
Well, I must say it has yielded tremendous results for us at Vidhaatri !
Sujay
President - Operations
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