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Maximizing your engineering productivity.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

While most companies realize mat greater engineering productivity can be a major competitive weapon, they have been unable to define and measure it consistently. A study by global management consulting company PRTM compared the engineering effectiveness of several market leaders and found some best in class tendencies.

In today's resource-constrained environment, companies are struggling to deliver more with less, and they are constantly exploring how to deliver the best possible product in the most efficient way. While most companies realize that greater engineering productivity can be a major competitive weapon, they have been unable to define and measure it consistently.

PRTM recently conducted a study that compared the engineering effectiveness of several market and technology leaders in the following high-complexity product categories: production copiers, wide-format printers, inkjet printers, production document scanners, patient-care systems, disc drives, automated self-service transaction solutions, industrial automation systems, mail-handling systems, high-end computer servers, and storage servers. Although the companies we studied do not directly compete, they share several characteristics. Their products are highly complex and incorporate diverse subsystems and components--electronics, electro-mechanics, and software--as well as specific technologies such as imaging, and materials- and chemicals-based technologies. In addition, their products operate in diverse, challenging environments and require robust, sophisticated testing.

Using a combination of quantitative metrics and qualitative insights, PRTM explored how these companies engineer and deliver their products, with a special focus on identifying engineering best practices and the extent to which these practices are adopted. Each company was assessed on three categories of engineering effectiveness:

* Engineering performance: how the engineers deliver along the dimensions of cycle time, effort burn rate (or resources), and quality.

* Engineering management: how the engineering managers fare along the dimensions of product planning and management of external development partners.

* Engineering competencies: how the engineering organization functions on a day-to-day basis along the three dimensions of systems approach (systems thinking, product and technology planning, intentional re-usability), specification and integration (requirements management, hardware/software integration, and systems verification), and project resourcing and execution (resource skill set development, external partner relationship development work estimation/tracking).

PRTM ranked the surveyed companies against each other using this framework and used a complexity model to compare the complexity of different product categories based on the underlying systems, electronics, software, and electromechanical factors. We then were able to compare the engineering performance and practices of companies with different products of the same complexity As a result, PRTM's study not only compares a company's engineering effectiveness against that of its direct competitors but also the relative engineering effectiveness of companies that make products of similar complexity and face similar engineering challenges.

Engineering performance metrics

After adjusting for product complexity, new products took most companies from 65 to 155 weeks to develop, compared with 27 to 125 weeks for best-in-class performers (Figure 1). On average, these product development efforts involved 10 to 85 full-time-equivalent engineers, as denoted by effort burn rate. As a measure of quality, she system defect closure rate reached as high as 99.8 percent, compared to 94.3 percent for average performers.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]...

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