More from a white paper about contract manufacturers

Since everything they manufacture is a custom product, they have issues that are unique to them. However, some of their issues may exist in your company as well.

Their primary challenge is achieving effective communications between departments which traditionally function independently – sales with engineering and engineering with manufacturing.

This week, let’s examine engineering issues.

• Clashes between sales and engineering – sales sells a product that engineering has determined can’t be built
• Re-engaging the customer during the design process due to post-order discoveries made by engineering
• Time pressures don’t allow for enough engineering time for the best design
• Engineering budget is mostly consumed by sales-related or order-engineering tasks leaving little money for new product innovation and development work
  

Our Thoughts…

These issues must look familiar to most of you. I am sure that these issues are taking up potential profit dollars.

I see a couple of key observations that can be made: There is a business process that is not working well [or processes]; and, when these processes cross departmental boundaries they are very disruptive [difficult to manage].

Let’s define a process as a collection of related, structured activities [a chain of events] that produce a service or product. Even before you think about software, you can map out your collection of related, structured activities and manage them to completion. When you are attempting to map out the activities across departments, you will learn what disruptive means…

It would be interesting to see what your real costs are surrounding these issues. I bet you would be surprised.

Your Thoughts…