Why you need to adapt and upgrade the skills of your engineering team faster ... and faster.

Reminder:  This is another posting is not written for everyone and anyone; this entire blog is written for SolidWorks experts ... for aspiring SolidWorks Experts ... it's a blog for people who aspire to become even BETTER Certified SolidWorks Experts, to go beyond what is required to become even MORE COMPLETE Certified SolidWorks Experts by helping others to use the technology more successfully.  

Maybe you have heard that the half-life of an engineer's professional knowledge is something like five years ... actually, I think it's less, but I'm a pessimist ... what an optimistic view of a five-year half-life means, is that in five years, half of your collected knowledge and experience as an engineer is meaningless ... you don't get to pick which half matters; the half that matters is probably the part you don't like all that well ... so make sure that you like ALL of what you do, because in five years the good half will be gone.  If you stay away from an industry for 10 years -- only one quarter of your expertise will be relevant.  If you graduated as an engineer 25 years ago, only 1/32th of what you learned as an engineer is relevant ... the degree is relevant because it proved you would bull your way through some tough courses to earn a professional degree.  And, obviously the basics (math, chemistry, physics, engineering mechanics) will always be relevant ... sort of  ... it's just that you won't have to use them very often or there will be a tool that will furnish the answer for you in a fraction of the time you could find the answer back in 1982  ... for example, when's the last time that you solved a problem that involved taking a derivative of a trigonometric function?

If you want to see more evidence of what your career is worth if you don't stay current -- take a look at the price of used books that cover software or information technology ...let's assume that you found Matt Lombard's Solidworks Administration Bible very useful and you believed a copy would pay for itself.   Three months ago, the cheapest way to buy this was in Amazon's Kindle format for about $35 (i.e. not an entirely bad option since you can also use Kindle for PC / Kindle for Android); if you wanted a printed hard copy, you would have spent roughly $40 [if you include shipping].   Today, you can buy a used, still good copy of Solidworks 2010 Administration Bible for only $6.31 ... with shipping it's around $10.  The market of CAD administrators who buy books like this is telling your that the value is somewhere in the neighborhood of a third what you would have paid a few months ago ... the reason that it's probably not worth a lot more than that is the same reason that your professional knowledge as an engineer declines so rapidly.  


Generally speaking, technology moves on because new technology makes people more productive ... you can justify the upgrade in CAD systems only because the new version makes people more productive ... it doesn't work for long to upgrade just because it's cool or you want to.  In things like CAD systems, we need to think about all of the people using the system.  When your team doesn't move to the technology that can make your team more productive, you risk falling behind ... you risk being less productive than competitors who are finding ways to be more productive.  This argument is NOT about justifying an automatic annual SolidWorks upgrade -- it is about the need to keep looking for ways to improve, to keep looking for ways that will make your team more productive.

Engineering is a discipline; it is also a team sport ... it is important to continually practice, develop, hone and update the discipline of thinking like an engineer by using technology to make you and your team more productive.  Information technology, search engines and new social knowledge networking tools like VARK.com have made collected knowledge and expertise more accessible to more people AND less valuable as something that any single one engineer should hold onto.  

By extension, proprietary knowledge has become a less valuable asset to companies ... many do not recognize this; many do not recognize that the asset that is actually more valuable is much more dynamic human engineering capital and team capital  ... although many still invest in retaining proprietary knowledge; like building a security and checkout system for a library that will ready in 2011 to filled with books like the SolidWorks 2010 Administration Bible..  What many companies do not yet recognize is that they can be stingy with their proprietary knowledge if they want ...and there are legitimate arguments, like safety concerns over unauthorized use, for being careful with the release of information.  But old financial and economic reasons have changed; it is a different world.  The global community of people who want to use a companies technology will take the path of least resistance and go elsewhere if they can -- when the proprietary knowledge is no longer relevant, the value of the stingy company's franchise plummets dramatically ... want an example?  Consider why [the more affordable, yet extremely powerful] SolidWorks has a larger installed base than any other CAD tool -- why isn't the base of Pro/E larger?  Also, by not paying attention to the shift to SolidWorks, what WILL be the cost of sticking with Pro/E to the companies who have a large legacy base of Pro/E users?

Your company's core engineering competency will push you to develop your own CAD/CAE extensions

Reminder:  This posting is not written for everyone and anyone; this entire blog is written for SolidWorks experts ... for aspiring SolidWorks Experts ... for people who aspire to become even BETTER Certified SolidWorks Experts, to go beyond what is required to become even MORE COMPLETE Certified SolidWorks Experts.  

At some point it is likely that you will need to extend SolidWorks or SolidWorks Simulation to develop capability that SolidWorks doesn't yet support ... that can't be, you say.  "We only use a tenth of what SolidWorks does now -- why would we need to extend it?  And Solidworks 2011 has even more stuff that looks great, but we won't learn to use that until 2012 or 2013."  My response to that is that you will develop the capability to use more of SolidWorks -- it's a complex tool, mastery takes time, but you work at it everyday ... you'll get there.  Frankly, you will never use most of what SolidWorks does -- there are some things that will never apply all that much to what you do; after all, there isn't any tool, any capability that anyone ever uses at 100% capacity.   


But your job is not to use the bleeding edge of SolidWorks per se, your job is to solve problems for your company ... those are the R&D, cutting-edge engineering problems will take you beyond what SolidWorks [or any other off-the-shelf CAD/CAE product] does; typically, these are not drafting problems (i.e. not about depicting a complicated cam-mating problem) which SolidWorks already does ... these problems are about the edge of engineering, simulation, variation, stochastic models, phase-changes and the very edge of what you know about the behavior of your own technology.    


But in some highly-specific areas that are core to your business, you will find that you really NEED to be ahead of SolidWorks; you can't afford to wait for SolidWorks or SolidWorks Simulation to release a tool that solves your problem.  The day may never come for the SolidWorks release of what you need ... the need for your application may be too small for Dassault -- even though it is huge for you.   At that point, you will almost necessarily be in a highly specialized, unique niche area of the technology that is THE core intellectual property that can take your company past what anyone else is doing ... unless you are in one of those companies where you depend on your brand AND the most important secret about your innovations is actually how damned little you really know.  In fact, I would claim that, almost by definition, if you can operate entirely within the SolidWorks you are either in a commodity business or your company is faking innovation ... good luck with faking innovation, but it's easy to predict that commodity businesses are going to get even more competitive.  

If anyone from Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea  ... or North Dakota  ...can pick up SolidWorks and reverse engineer your designs, grok your workflows and essentially imitate what you do [and probably do some parts of it better], there will be significant and GROWING competitive pressure on your business company's model ... and your salary.

That is why ... eventually ... your company's desire for success and desire to maintain or extend it core engineering competency will push you to DEVELOP your own CAD/CAE extensions ... of course, you will rely on the "commodity" functionality that all other SolidWorks users exploit, but it will be your FOUNDATION ... not the limit of your universe.  Most companies are not there yet ... most companies develop their own tooling and manufacturing processes, but they have not really turned the corner where they develop and extend their internal engineering, R&D, test and other "knowledge work" processes.  Eventually, you will get to the point where you gather the requirements from your users and you start developing your extensions to further automate your engineering ... or you and the other engineers at your company will work for less.  Quite a lot less ... global competition will make your company less likely to compete and will impact what your company can pay you.  Also, we should remember that engineering salaries in China or India are maybe as low as only 15% or so of what those salaries are in the USA.  











NEXT... the lines between IT systems development and engineering are blurring ... in my next few blog entries I will writing about my background as software quality engineer, about process audits and about some of the crossovers and best practices that make sense for ensuring the quality of CAD models and integrity of things like properties for ensure full benefit from associativity ... things like pair programming, agile test-driven development, authenticated check-in/check-out revision control and configuration management systems for distributed development, CAD/IT administration etc

Why it is necessary to master the virtual realm of CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE

It is thirty years since I started as a freshman in Agricultural Engineering Iowa State University; I am now a crusty, old retired engineer ... but my career [up to this point] in research, turning around small companies, supply chain development, product development and launch engineering has led me to the conclusion that it is now ESPECIALLY necessary to master the virtual realm ... in no particular order of significance, the reasons to master the virtual realm are:

• To overcome complexity with automation of routine, mundane engineering computation and the use of visual tools that allow for illustration of gargantuan amounts of data. 
• To exploit the ability to experiment in the virtual realm with set-based concurrent engineering [by modeling/simulating different designs based upon deliberately-chosen sets of factors] and using parallel, competing paths to learn as much as possible, as fast possible, as early as possible BEFORE wasting time, resources on physical prototypes, BEFORE building product-intent scrap.
• To utilize these modeling tools reliance on property associativity and design re-usability to extract more value from data repositories
• To exploit these tools capabilities for DFM / DFA / DFSS / DFx, tolerance engineering, FEA/CFD simulation  to learn about issues EARLY in the product development and launch cycle. 
• To become a master of anything [including a profession like engineering], a warrior must care for, sharpen and continually develop his tools. 
• To become fluent and effective in communicating in the language of hyper-efficient, hyper-rapid, hyper-frugal product launch and development engineer ... to work efficiently with talent wherever that talent is in the world. 
• To launch better products more rapidly for less cost for people that I care about.  

Perhaps I should explain how I came to this conclusion ...

Nobody should monkey around with stuff because it is cool ... praying to God and trying to be more like Jesus is cool; spending time with people who need you is cool; trying to fathom the beauties of God's creation and being a steward of nature is cool ... even though mastering the use of computer-aided design (CAD) packages like SolidWorks or Pro/E, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) packages like MasterCAM or SolidCAM, computer-aided inspection (CAI) like PC-DMIS or PolyWorks, computer-aided engineering (CAE) packages for a variety of finite-element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems like SolidWorks Simulation or ANSYS Fluent or Matlab/Simulink is definitely cool.  Mastering the all of the facets of virtual realm of CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE is definitely cool WHEN YOU GET TO THE POINT WHERE YOU CAN HELP PEOPLE ... but until you get to that level of mastery, the software packages are costly fritterware or just more junk that you are trying to make into something productive. 


What is FRITTERWARE, you ask?  Before you attain mastery of these tools, you will need to commit to significant investment of time because the complexity of these packages will fritter away an enormous amount of your time while you are trying desparately to use them to do something productive.   If you want to persevere through the difficulties of mastering this range of different tools ...AND as an expert, you also will want to learn how the different technicians, draftsmen, engineers [that you are trying to assist/lead] can collaborate more effectively using the tools together ... if you want to persevere in the dark/frustrating hours where everyone is screaming to make the stuff work NOW, you need to remember WHY mastering the virtual realm is so important in the first place!

Mastering the virtual realm is about significant, exponential growth in SPEED and PRODUCTIVITY, more specifically mastering the virtual realm is about the speed and productivity of product development and launch teams.  It's about improving the speed and productivity of what engineers do ... which can be a slightly itchy subject because engineers are used to improving the speed and productivity of other people do.  Worst of all, mastering the virtual realm involves getting the commitment of an engineering manager ... typically an engineer with 15 or 20 years of experience and, more importantly, a record of demonstrated effectiveness as an engineer ...  engineering managers did not come of age having the affordable power of today's CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools available to them.  They may have wanted tools like these, they may have dreamt of the day they'd have tools that actually performed like software vendors promised ... the fact of the matter is that highly affordable, extremely powerful CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools were simply not available until very, very recently.  Some engineering managers can adapt and will support a program leading to rapid mastery of the virtual realm; other engineering managers can't adapt or won't adapt -- the engineering managers who can't or won't adapt WILL sink their companies.

The reason that quickly mastering these tools is important is HUGE shift in where engineering talent is located now.  The MOST exciting developments in development and launch engineering are coming from India and China where YOUNGER, LESS EXPERIENCED, MORE PROGRESSIVE engineering managers have budgets sufficient to equipment armies of young engineers with these powerful tools to engage in FRUGAL development.  In other words, mastering the virtual realm is not only about mastering these tools within your company ... it is ALSO about becoming fluent enough in the language CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools in order to access a talent pool from around the globe ... offshoring is no longer just about components, tools and dies made in India or China ... offshoring is now about using engineering talent from whereever it is on the planet to be faster and more productive.

It is necessary to master the virtual realm in order to speak the language of hyper-efficient, hyper-rapid, hyper-frugal product launch and development.  If you don't speak the language in that new world ... you can't go anywhere, you can't eat anything, you can't even use the restroom ... you had better stay home where it's safe, except that, if you are launching and developing new products, you can't go home again! 

My own path to mastering this virtual realm might not be what one would predict ... twentysome years ago, I was trying to learn everything about statistics that I could so that I could more efficiently design experiments that could be completed more rapidly with fewer resources ... in the 90's I was trying to get small manufacturers to educate their employees about things like GDT and to develop consistent processes so that they could establish the foundation of continuous improvement and become leaner ... for the last decade, I've been trying to get product development teams in larger companies to avoid designing in complexity or to avoid sloppy engineering that resulted in the need to fight fires, inspect-in quality.   I haven't abandoned any of these skills; I haven't abandoned my commitment to lean, continuous improvement; I believe in the need for aggressively working to constantly simplify more than ever.