In 1970, tire manufacturer Firestone recalled 10 million tires. A faulty engineering design separated the belt from the tread: the rubber on the circumference that makes contact with the road. Unfortunately, it took dozens of accidents to recognize the manufacturing defect.
New engineers need to understand their mistakes can have serious consequences. If you want to move up the career ladder swiftly, the room for error is slim to none (actually none).
If you're a first-time hardware creator, here's something you might not have learned: Your hardware's prototype is the key stage between idea and production (manufacturing lots of them).
“What is not on paper has not been said.” Anonymous
Let's talk about customer requirements.
Sometimes I find myself in a social situation where I don’t know a bunch of folks. After introductions, one of the first questions is: “What do you do?” I try to gage the level of interest and most of the time my answer is pretty simple: “I work as an engineer.”
It’s easy to get excited about a project that you are working on – in fact, it happens to me all the time.
I start working on something and as I find out more about the technical issues, or the work’s relevance in the overall scheme of things, I get more and more excited about the work that I am doing. And when I get an opportunity to present out the status of the project or brief the experts on a particular issue being worked on, I want to make sure I present as full of a picture of the project as possible. That just makes sense: good data in = good results out.
Let me admit something up front: I didn’t start drinking coffee until I turned 40.
In our current caffeinated society, where 32-ounce morning coffee thermoses are the norm, this must sound pretty backwards or maybe unsophisticated. Truth be told, I thought coffee tasted bitter and had an acidy aftertaste. Unless I put so much sugar and milk into my coffee that it started tasting like coffee ice cream, I wouldn’t drink it.
Every discipline and "domain" has its own unique jargon, vocabulary – including slang, acronyms, and more – and associated concepts. This is as true for cooking (e.g., sautee, carmelize, roue), baseball ("bases loaded," etc.), and the like.
There's no shortage of success stories on the use of project management methods like Lean and Agile to software development (which is what Agile was formulated for) or for manufacturing (Lean's origin from Toyota).
In the old days of “over the wall engineering,” all engineers had to do was throw drawings over the wall to manufacturing. That’s it. Nothing to worry about. Production planners and manufacturing folks would figure out how to make a product close to what designers were dreaming, sketching, and designing.
I’ve been fortunate having been given the chance to talk to many manufacturing companies ranging in size from small hardware startups to large manufacturing companies. In having done so, I’ve learned much from asking people about Bills of Materials, or BOM. Doing so exposes much about how a company designs, manufacturers, and services its products.