Big ships have a rule: their maximum speed is limited so that their current visibility is always double their effective turning radius. It doesn’t do much good to see an obstacle coming if it’s already too late to turn the ship; you’ll just end up floating on a door somewhere in the North Atlantic.
But limiting your speed can kill product designers other ways. Military veterans will be familiar with OBE, or “Overcome By Events.” It basically means that big report you’ve been writing for the last two weeks about how a certain bridge is the key to victory doesn’t matter anymore because the bridge just got blown up. So you can’t go too slow trying to avoid all icebergs, or you’ll be OBE.
So why don’t design companies go faster and simultaneously course correct more often, like a speedboat instead of an oil tanker? It’s usually the cost of getting feedback.
Gathering all your department heads in a room for a management review is quite expensive, at going management rates. Getting feedback from customers, co-workers and suppliers distributed across the world requires getting the same data to all of them and collecting the feedback in some organized fashion. And getting the manufacturing floor or focus groups to touch and hold your idea, well, physical prototypes always take a chunk of time and money. Each of these methods of feedback have a fixed cost, so what do companies do to reduce that fixed business cost? What should they do?
Come find out. On September 25th CAPINC and GrabCAD will have a joint webinar discussing feedback best practices. We'll also talk about what small, nimble and global engineering companies have found to be the best rules for using Workbench to get just the right frequency of feedback to maximize your turning radius. It’s a free, one-hour webinar, so view the recording below and tell your icebergs to shove it.
This post has been shortened. The full version was written by Shuvom Ghose and originally published on the CAPINC blog. The full version can be found here.
The webinar recording can be found here.
How to Get Global and Local Feedback on Your CAD Designs
Cloud-based tools like GrabCAD Workbench make it easy to share 3D models with anyone, even non-CAD users, allowing them to see and markup the CAD model right in their web browser. 3D printing has made it simple to get a high-quality physical prototype whenever you need it. This webinar will show you how combining these two approaches can get you feedback easily and often from local and global team members – and find out what your customers and partners REALLY think!
