Engineering landscape is evolving rapidly.
With increasing complexity of user requirements, stretched performance expectations and emergence of complex tools and technologies - product and system development landscape is rapidly changing. For those engineering companies which are still using the traditional design methods and linear workflows for product development and delivery, does it mean that they are walking on a slow path of irrecoverable obsolence?
At AVION, we think they are. The solution here is to think big and embrace the innovation, We believe that innovation is not optional, it is a 'must have’ part of our day to day work life, and at AVION, it's the foundation of our beliefs.
To understand the big picture around innovation, first we need to understand the factors shaping this big picture. The factors have emerged rapidly in the last couple of decades and will continue to influence markets for coming decades creating the social, economic, technological and operational shifts.
Socio-economic effects
Consumer markets are shifting from need based to choice based customer segments. As a result of the advances in global logistics, it's now possible to deliver a diverse portfolio of products to satisfy niche nuances in customer demands. Moreover focus and awareness about sustainability potential of products, awareness about fairness of the supply chain processes and ethical image of the manufacturer is also important in shaping the consumer needs. In the era driven by policymaking, the changes in policies are influencing products to be more sustainable. The engineering companies need to respond to these vectors and rejuvenate their innovation and development processes.
Transformation of the financial markets allows niche ideas to avail capital in real and digital currencies on the promise of growth and factors such as current capacity and maturity offer insignificant advantages when availing finances for novel and innovative ideas. The advanced transportation and logistical capabilities allow for extended manufacturing partners to emerge and be an organic part of the manufacturing process despite of being geographically separated. This allows organisations to leverage the low cost economies as well as rapidly build effective specialist skillsets for easier assimilation into the supply chain and manufacturing. These socio-economic forces are hardly a novel mention yet there are some engineering organisations still wading through the relatively conventional and protected paths that dismiss their relevance either partially of completely.
Emerging technologies
Innovation, manufacturing, assembly, supply-chain and services are key pillars for engineering organisations. Availability of digital technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, is not only accelerating the innovation process but also making it more affordable and less resource intensive for smaller players in the industry. Availability of manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacturing and 3d printing, assembly processes such as diode laser welding are reducing the costs, defects and lead times at the same time are improving precision and quality. Availability of a scalable, reliable and well organised service industry solutions allow the organisation be in a close relative proximity of their customers. Such emerging trends in the technology offer an excellent competitive advantage to the relatively younger enterprises who have lower technical debts in the form of existing equipment and process infrastructure.
The startup culture
The startup culture allows relatively novel and high risk ideas to attract funding and talent to grow the operations. These newer organisations naturally have a smaller and higher performing footprint without the legacy equipment and process burden making the them more suitable to adopting the change drivers.
Integrative development methods
The traditional linear workflow models focus which seem to be popular with conventional engineering organisations focus on extensive design and development followed by the testing and delivery phase. The newer trend is integrative product design. It allows significant focus on the requirements rather than the detailed design in the early stages of the programme. Also focus on serial testing as compared to milestone based testing. These integrative development methods allow the organisations to fail quicker, at a relatively lower costs and learn from the failure in a much more efficient way as compared to traditional engineering programmes.
Collaborative and AI tools
A huge upsurge in the capability and reliability of the collaborative and AI tools is also a key driver for lasting impacts on the engineering organisations. Collaborative tools allow for distributed to teams to be formed and work effectively limiting the effect of time and distance barriers. These tools allow organisations to from productive and mutually beneficial collaborative partnerships with other players and domain experts. It perhaps allows organisations to isolate themselves from the non-value added work that they can collaboratively fulfil through a collaboration partner and thus allowing them to focus more on value added work. The ongoing developments in the AI fields are allowing organisations to solve complex problems through learning derived from current and past data. Such technologies allow for radical change in process, methods and customer experience all delivered at a relatively lower costs and efforts.
Highly scalable infrastructure
Developing an IT or manufacturing infrastructure is not a labour intensive and costly affair anymore, thanks for advances in cloud computing platforms and MAAS (Manufacturing as a service) platforms. The cloud computing infrastructure allows organisations to focus on the applications rather than infrastructure. It offers an instantly and dynamically scalable option to create, manage and consume vast amounts of data. It allows for real time monitoring and reporting for a digital enterprise. Likewise the advances in supply chain allow for external manufacturing infrastructure to be integrated at a scale to provide necessary capacity and capabilities with a short lead time.
Digitalisation of workflow
Perhaps one of the most important factors affecting manufacturing is how workflows are getting digitalised using specialised 'apps' developed for the enterprise. Several document and transaction heavy processes can not be easily containerised into a scalable application that provides a precise workflow and progress metrics. This reduces the need to human interface and handing / processing of data and is well supported by developments in tools and cloud data infrastructure. These digitalised workflows then allow the organisations to focus more on value added activities while leaving the processes running continuously in a seamless process and data ecosystem.
From created to curated to synthesised information
Conventional engineering workflows depend on the 'created' information - the information that's manually generated by individuals. With the early advances in the IT technologies - this shifted to 'curated' information - the information gathered from multiple sources but linked based on certain level commonality or overlap of the central theme. With the recent developments in the fields of AI and big data, the information can now be 'synthesised' - the information that's created based on logical transformations and neural functions applied to the data. The synthesis can be used to create refined set of usable data, processes or to eliminate obsolete and irrelevant elements.
Putting it all together, the causal interaction between above elements generates the social, economical, technical and operational shifts which in turn demand the engineering organisations to embrace these shifts and deliver innovations to gain a competitive advantage. Not evaluating and adjusting to these vectors will most certainly result in a loss of competitive advantage and eventual obsolesce for the engineering organisations.
Innovating in engineering
Innovation is not necessarily about delivering next generation of products with features that generate a new market share. For engineering organisations, innovations can be delivered through a careful strategy that analyses and assimilates the influence vectors and shifts discussed above. For new engineering organisations, the focus should be on harnessing these opportunities as realising the ability to do this offers them a competitive edge is a key to success. For established engineering organisations, mapping the gradual transition from the traditional workflows to the ones that address the influence vectors and shift would ensure their competitiveness and continued existence.
At AVION, we specialise in helping engineering organisations to just do this. We can systematically identify these opportunities and deliver an organisational innovation roadmap that will map out the gradual transformation.
