Top performers are:
- Over 3 times as likely to use rules-based design approaches.
- About twice as likely to develop a single, global product.
- 50% more likely to leverage platform design techniques.
- 38% more likely to use modular design approaches.
Best Practices Used by Top Performers
"What really set the top performers apart tended to be not necessarily their strategy or their focus, but the way they were going about designing product," Brown explained. "They are taking different and more advanced processes and using different enabling technology that goes along with those advanced engineering and design disciplines or processes to gain the advantage."
According to the report, top performers are far more likely to use configuration design automation tools in order to run a modular building block-based approach in the design of their equipment.
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This approach has the potential to drastically reduce the engineering time and costs associated with fulfilling new orders or customizing products for new applications.
For example, Brown explained that engineers can take the designs for a valve in one of two directions: either they can design a new valve for each particular application by itself, making each a one off, or they can design a base unit that can be reconfigured depending on the application.
"We're seeing leading companies take an approach where they've got a core design and then, depending on the specific requirements of an application or even based on a particular order, they are able to tailor that platform or tailor that sort of base design specifically to meet different needs," he noted.
This provides companies a tremendous amount of reuse in terms of design time and in terms of actually testing and validating that design, he said.
"The challenge is it takes more work upfront to design it in a way to be customizable, to design it as a platform, to design as being as modular," he cautioned. "But then as you get into the time when orders are coming in and you need to react quickly, you're not doing a fresh design every time. You're just reusing all this engineering knowledge that you built up and applying it to that new situation."
