Thinking about engineering and design
For the last seven weeks, Ralph Grabowski has been writing in upFront.eZine about CAD companies he met up with in his recent tour through Russia.
This week, he writes about NTP Truboprovod. As he explains, in Russian, Truboprovod means "piping systems." If you're interested in tools for piping systems engineering, you should read his article. Actually, if you're interested in how engineering software will affect the business of engineering, you should read the entire series of articles.
Here are some thoughts I had when reading this week's installment:
The disciplines of engineering and design have often been thought of as being inextricably linked. In practice, what we call “engineering software” is often better described as “design software.”
Yet, what happens when this software matures to the point where engineering and design functions, while still intertwined, are logically separable? It introduces interesting possibilities, and opens up even more interesting questions. Such as: For a large US or European engineering firm, is engineering or design the more core (sustainable and profitable) competency?
Rephrasing a bit, in the context of Ralph's article: If it's possible to do engineering in house, yet outsource detail design to Russian engineers using Russian design software for ¼ the cost, why not consider it?
Let me give you a related example: I recently talked to the owner of a steel fabrication company that builds parts for bridges. (I'll tell you more about him in a later post. He's an interesting fellow.) In his company, there are three important competencies: project management, steel detailing, and fabrication. He employs about 200 people, including project managers and welders, at his main facility. Yet, he has steel detailing work done at a subsidiary in India.
If you think about this kind of outsourcing, it makes a lot of sense. The company is an AISC certified major bridge fabricator, with fracture-critical endorsement. For reasons of accountability, it simply can't outsource its welding, and off-shoring it, even to a wholly owned subsidiary, would create insurmountable traceability and scheduling problems. Yet, by using best-in-class software (Tekla Structures, in this case), it can do steel detailing anywhere in the world. India, with its large pool of mechanical engineering graduates and English as a primary language, is a natural choice.
It's not my intention to get into a detailed discussion of software functionality here. Whether we're talking about structural design software from Tekla, or piping systems software from Autodesk, Rebis, Intergraph, Bentley, Coade, or NTP Truboprovod is not important.
What is important is whether the software tools used by engineering firms support the distinction between engineering and design--both logically, and through open interoperability.
By the way, if you think this issue has any merit, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Evan Yares
in Engineering Software, Interoperability, Russia, The CAD Industry
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5 Comments
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1 Reference
References (1)
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Source: NTP Truboprovod
Reader Comments (5)
I just learned about the design process of a company that makes highly-engineered consumer electronics. Not only have they outsourced their detail design to Southeast Asia, they've also outsourced their engineering. Basically, they send some specs and some images or surfaces from an industrial designer. All of the CAE, CAD, and sourcing is opaque to the company. They receive some screens shots of the CAD data, sketch on some edits, and move to production. They don't even care about the original CAD data; by the time the detailed design is done it's seconds from manufacture, they're already focused on next season's model. No PLM. No CAD. Just getting products to market as quickly as possible.
On one hand, as an engineer in the States, it's frightening. However, I'd be more frightened if I were their competitor and did not have as nimble a release cycle.
Interesting times.
-Blake
Another interesting discussion.
In my experience, where the design function was not 'close coupled' to the engineering (executing) function, then the latter group becomes more capable of coming up with design improvement ideas whereas the design group become less capable. I guess this is just another example of the truism of 'necessity being the mother of invention'?
By exporting manufacturing we (the UK) became less versed in manufacturing and thus less capable.
By exporting manufacturing we became less able to choose between more or less capable manufacturing processes, basically we exported the problem. Solutions to the problems and hence the necessity to solve or improve them became largely irrelevant to us.
Once we were no longer involved in the problems or solutions of manufacture then there was no longer a need to teach these skills to later generations.
Enterprises with a free choice will choose to develop new engineering products in countries with up to date engineering facilities and support infrastructure.
Hopefully, we are all currently aware of the need of design for manufacture? This will be an increasingly clever trick to pull off with little or no knowledge in engineering manufacture?
Now that I've rambled on....I'll get to my point! If we separate engineering and design, then how do we improve the design function without first hand knowledge of engineering? I propose that this too will become an increasingly difficult trick to pull off.
My belief is that we need more not less integration of the various functions of engineering, if we are to compete.
Kind regards,
Jonathan
I have a quibble with your statement "The disciplines of engineering and design have often been thought of as being inextricably linked" in that today's most widely used plant design software (Intergraph, Aveva, Bentley) all have very poor linkage between engineering and design. For example, pipe routed in any of the above-mentioned software has to be manually checked by outside analysis software for piping stress and fluid flow. Not a single package works anything close to "seamless" to the point where in practice, the designers have to create separate isometrics for the piping engineers who then manually input it into their piping analysis programs (Caesar II, Autopipe, etc) and after making changes, the piping engineers then have to manually create a drawing with their proposed changes which they hand back to the designers. Oops, you can't place that loop there Mr. Piping engineer, there's a clash! And the manual back-and-forth continues. That is today's reality with most engineers and designers in plant design. And I have yet to see even one P&ID software package which has thought to link to a pipe flow analysis software to check flow rates with pump curves, so again, manual back-and-forth is required. Structural designers using the above-mentioned software packages have only the crudest of links (problematic 1-way neutral files) to 3rd party analysis programs like Staad, SAP2000, or Risa. The problem is that design and analysis/design are FAR from being "inextricably linked", they are in fact treated as separate islands because of design software limitations. I'm guessing, but the creators of design software seem to think of the engineers as separate isolated disciplines rather than integral to the design. Yet any designer attempting to do preliminary routing of 500 degree piping without analysis is flying by the seat of his pants, as there is no way he can reliably anticipate thermal expansion effects without analysis. And the piping engineer tasked with solving this problem with pipe stress analysis has no way to check the effects of all the expansion loops and elbows that he's added for flexibility with flow analysis, which is yet another engineering discipline, in order to see if he's caused problems with pump power requirements and flow velocities in order to meet process requirements...so there has to be additional manual back-and-forth with process engineers. Very disconnected workflows between design and engineeering, which is an additional layer of complication when sucontracting work to another country
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