Of course, there are times where you think your team can take on the world no problem because well, you’re that good. But most of the time it is about much more than handling multiple projects at once. It’s about making sure the job gets done without compromising quality and the reputation of your brand.
Have you ever over-committed and realized at a certain point that it was too much for your team to take on? Without finding a solution would mean under-achieving on tasks just so that you and your team could get everything done. Let’s face it – the working memory of human brain has a limited capacity. In fact, only 2% of the population is actually proficient at multi-tasking.
So why waste your time trying to beat the odds? Here are 3 reasons why you need to stop taking on too many projects.
1. It’s a Sign that You’re Not Delegating your Tasks Appropriately
Stop doing everything yourself and let others help you. Delegating your tasks to those that have the time and expertise to do so will help you eliminate the risks of under-performing on projects.
It’s important for us to realize that we can seek help when it is needed. We can’t always do everything ourselves. It is better for you to let someone take over some of your tasks so you can focus on your most important tasks. Instead of wasting your time trying to figure something out yourself, let the experts help you.
Manufacturing and Product Development departments are turning to Engineering Services offered through small to medium sized companies and handing off projects to engineers outside of their own business to meet time-sensitive deadlines.
2. It’s Intensifying Your Time Management Problem
If you’re already past the point of planning ahead, then you can still manage the time you have left by dividing your remaining tasks into manageable goals. The plan is to increase productivity in the long run by finding ways to save and manage the time you currently have. Finding a long term solution for time management will result in working smarter, not harder.
Time management is not something that everyone is great at all the time. The important thing is to recognize when you are having a hard time and seek out the appropriate solution.
3. It Means that You’re Not Prioritizing your Projects
Determine what the optimal number of projects is that you should be managing to ensure appropriate planning and strong execution and control. You should be spending 75% of your time and effort on the projects within your team that are top priority. The other 25% of projects should be assigned to those that can take on the project with minimal interjection on your part.
Eliminate a chaotic work environment by handing off the lowest priority tasks to others and gaining back control of your highest priorities.
Why you should turn to EAC’s Engineering Services Team
Our Engineering Services Team at EAC Product Development Solutions – coined the Extensioneering Services — work with manufacturers, academic institutions, and engineering and design organizations throughout North America. Our engineering experts are located in Minneapolis, Minnesota and are working around the clock to ensure they deliver engineering solutions that exceed our customer’s expectations.
Delivering quality work is a critical part of maintaining the trust of your customers. Our engineers leverage years of experience and deep knowledge of engineering disciplines to provide you with fast, high quality, and innovative design services. EAC has completed more than 400 projects over the last 20 years. We take pride in our ability to adapt to the ever-changing technology landscape to provide innovative solutions to our customer’s problems.
Risk… what does it mean?
For some, it is crossing the street. For others, it is starting a company with the last of their own money, or money from an expectant and hopeful investor.
But, what does it mean for companies/customers? Ultimately, I think it drives everything at a company. For some companies, often publicly traded, risk is not an option. Everything they do must have a strong business case to produce more revenue with little or no risk. Smaller companies tend to be much more willing to take risks. Sometimes it’s the only way to get the growth they so desperately want and need. In between you’ll find many companies along the willing-to-take-on-risk spectrum.
How do you convince your company or customer to take a risk?
One way is to downplay the risk. Not a good idea. It can, and likely will, bite you in the end. No, you must address risk head on. You must out weigh the risk with the potential benefits. Show examples of success. Find and present metrics from those that have gone before you. Show the potential benefit the customer/company can recognize if they accept the proposed risk. Even after all that, you may only open the door to considering an improvement project. It does not guarantee a person or company will proceed.
You must address the risk
Address the risk head on. Show how you, or your company, will mitigate risk throughout the venture. Always keep in mind the customer’s or your company’s view on risk. It could be as simple as a loss of the investment into a project. On the other end of the spectrum could be lost customers, lost revenue, or even lost jobs. By not dismissing the risk, but acknowledging it and trying to prevent it, it shows your commitment to the customer, whether internal or external. It shows you are a partner, not just someone trying to sell an idea and run.
In the end, everyone wants to grow. Very few want to take the risks needed to grow. If you’re trying to help your customer or company grow and improve, you must prove you will do everything possible to manage risk, but not dismiss its existence in the first place.
Assessments help organizations avert risk
Are you in the process of accepting risk in order to improve, grow, or move in a new direction? We offer many solutions that can help mitigate risk — solutions and services with proven track records that adhere to best practices. We also offer a Product Development System Assessment (PDSA) and Functional Group Assessment (FGA) to help align organizations, define strategic direction, and help map the best course forward. Download our PDSA brochure or FGA brochure to learn more. Please share your experience and thoughts about accepting and managing risk in the comments below.
Cheers.
The Internet of Things (IoT) poses unique challenges when it comes to protecting smart, connected devices. If devices are hacked, they could cause serious problems. It’s critical to understand what these challenges are and how you can overcome them. A secure IoT solution requires complete collaboration among the infrastructure, platform, developer, and device controller.
Some of the security challenges the IoT faces include user management in the cloud, device variety, and application vulnerability.
User Management in the Cloud
Cloud permissions are typically granted to one human using one application, there are firm boundaries around the authentication and authorization processes. When the IoT is in the cloud as well, devices can authenticate themselves as a human or on behalf of a human. This means a much more complex permission process as well as a trust model must be put in place to maintain security.
A big difference between the cloud and the IoT is that the IoT (typically) has more devices than the cloud. For a hacker to do serious damage, they don’t need to penetrate all of the devices, just a small number of them or even a single weakly protected device.
Variety of Devices
The varying types of smart, connected devices present immense opportunity for damage if a hacker successfully overtakes them. Organizations must ensure their devices and applications are secure from attackers even with knowledge of IoT operations.
Researchers have found they have could interfere with driving an automobile, the functionality of a pacemaker, and even changing the position of rifle’s aim. Your device security is critical.
Application Vulnerabilities
Hackers could go as far as gaining instant access to high-level IoT deployments. They can do this by targeting security weaknesses in the firmware and/or applications running on embedded systems. If your IoT implementation is not properly managed, a compromise of a single device could compromise your entire system.
Environments where devices are deployed through other organization’s networks are especially important. Your organization’s ability to lessen security issues among devices will decrease if you lose control leaving your applications vulnerable.
Now that you’ve read through some of the security challenges the IoT faces, you may want to take a moment and continue reading to learn how to protect your digital data, as well as security best practices: authenticate, authorize, and audit. Security risks associated with the IoT are growing, but you can take preventative action to ensure the security of your IoT devices and deployments.
Rob Black, CISSP Senior Director of Product Management at PTC wrote the White Paper, “Protecting smart devices and applications throughout the IoT ecosystem,” where he reviews IoT security best practices.
One challenge when working with technical information is that publications can be very large. Several hundred pages is not unusual and in some cases over a thousand pages are necessary to describe complex service procedures and part catalogs.
Authoring and assembling large books can be a painful process as the sheer size can be taxing to software. XML, DITA, and managing content objects do ease the pain, it is what industrial strength publishing software is designed to do. However, there is only so much information the average workstation can process.
Many creative solutions have been implemented to meet unique business requirements for book assembly. The business requirements and data sources vary from company to company, such as selecting lessons individually to create a complete custom course; or selecting individual part list and image pairs to create a complete part catalog. As an application expert, I have personally coded many custom solutions to support cobbling books together over the years and I know that many other equally creative solutions exist.
PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:
- Translation Management
- Part List Generation
- Publication Structures
Publication Structures are the least sexy of the three and the one that truly revolutionizes the book assembly process. Publication Structures are used to assemble information objects that are to be published. Essentially each Publication Structure represents a book. You can add a table of contents, a parts list, or any other XML content object or images to the book right in the Windchill SIM web browser user interface.
Without Publication Structures, books are typically assembled manually in Arbortext Editor. Someone would still have to assemble the book manually in a Publication Structure, but the user experience is very different. To get a sense of this, in Arbortext Editor, if a writer wants to move a chapter to a different location, they would edit the document, select content, cut it, move to the new location, and then paste. In a Publication Structure, the user can drag and drop chapter or section objects in the structure without ever opening the book to edit it.
Publication Structures provide an out-of-the-box method of assembling publications for the technical documentation community without customizing. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.
Learn More
EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.
Are you hearing voices? If not, you should be!
Well, are you hearing voices? You know, the voices telling you how to make more money, or the whispers of how you can improve your business, or maybe they’re loud and proud notices of problems before they occur. Where would such messages of insight and prosperity come from? I’m talking about the voices of all that expensive equipment you have that keeps producing your product.
As manufacturers, we all invest heavily in the equipment, maintenance, and staff to keep it running smoothly or sometimes get it running quickly after unexpected malfunctions. What would it mean to your business if your equipment could tell you how well it’s running and if something is going to malfunction before it even happens? The ability for your equipment to ‘talk’ to you could substantially impact planning, proactive maintenance, utilization, production rates, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and most certainly the bottom line.
Business 101: businesses require a solid Return on Investment (ROI). High cap ex-equipment implies the “I” and requires production to make the “R.” We all run this daily balance of scheduling maintenance, guessing what needs to be fixed, hoping everything runs right over the third shift and talking ourselves into the thought that we’re getting the most from the equipment. Taking a long look in the mirror might challenge that thought.
Considering connectivity is cheaper and ‘nearly’ everywhere, along with easier ways to stream, collect and refine data into actionable information, the realistic impact of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings some futuristic opportunities to your desktop for implementation today.
Think About the Possibilities
What if your equipment could self-diagnose problems, predict failure timelines and prioritize maintenance based on enterprise-wide visibility to OEE, production demands and current performance?
How about leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) to peer into the heart of operating equipment for live feedback and real-time vision-based maintenance instruction holo-deck style?
What if you could view the rates and predicted issues of entire production lines from a single-pane-of-glass? Imagine viewing this with live interactive graphics, drill-down analytics, and mashups pulling data from existing silos of information.
While some of this seems like a ‘nice-to-have future state,’ rest assured, this is as real and available as it comes. It’s what can be implemented so you can start hearing voices. It’s ThingWorx. ThingWorx is a tool to enable developers such as yourself to rapidly connect, create, and deploy breakthrough applications, solutions, and experiences for the smart, connected world. Furthermore, ThingWorx Analytics enables you to uncover the true value of your smart connected manufacturing floor data. Learn from past data, understand and predict the future, and make decisions that will enhance outcomes.
If you’d like more information about connecting your products through smart manufacturing, explore our piece that serves as a primer on the fundamentals of ThingWorx.
Industrial Design has always been an important element of successful product development. Aesthetically and functionally pleasing products are important to customer perception and ultimately may add to increased acceptance and improved sales.
The Engineering Services Group at EAC Product Solutions solved such an industrial design challenge for a valued customer, Bob Barker Company, Inc. Bob Barker is America’s leading detention supplier and maker of the Vancell, which is a prisoner transport unit that is installed in commercial vans. They approached EAC to create a successor, which ultimately became the Vancell Elite.
Bob Barker wanted the new version of the Vancell to fit newer, redesigned van models. At the same time, they requested upgrades to several user features. They wanted to incorporate design elements to differentiate the redesign of the Vancell from its competitors. The redesign was required to invoke feelings of ruggedness, strength, and security.
With those challenging requirements, the Designers in the Engineering Services Group started by selecting diamond plate panels for the exterior of the access doors to elude to the element of ruggedness. The diamond shaped patterns were then carried through to the ventilation cutouts in wall panels for continuity of theme. A new logo, designed by Bob Barker Company, was added to the access doors as well as laser cut sheet metal brackets. The bracket was painted black with another bracket behind painted orange for a bold, three-dimensional look. A small Bob Barker decal was placed nearby to increase brand awareness. The Designers also added chrome paddle latches and bright screw heads to accent the diamond patterns and create a sense of security.
Next, a new base color was needed for the exterior of the unit. The competitor’s prisoner transport unit was painted a sterile white that easily showed dirt and wear. The old Vancell was painted a dull gray. Bob Barker Company wanted to set themselves apart from both of these units with a bold and dynamic color. Using CAD models created in PTC Creo, the Designers rendered images in different colors to help the company determine which color was best. A medium matte blue was selected.
Upon agreement of design features and colors, manufacturing drawings were released to a third-party fabrication shop. The prototype of the first transport unit was completed in time for display and demonstration at a large trade show. The Marketing and Sales team at Bob Barker Company were excited about the appearance and function of the completed Vancell Elite and confirmed that it met their requirements — rugged, strong, and secure. They also received many positive comments from prospective customers at the trade show.
The VanCell Elite difference is not only through its new and improved design, but it’s features as well. The VanCell Elite provides improved visibility for greater officer security through controlled viewing, PREA compliant segregation compartments, and an enhanced 4 Camera Viewing System and optional DVR upgrade.
Learn more about the VanCell Elite here.
If you have industrial design or engineering project, the Engineering Services Group can step in and mentor you throughout your design process or act as your engineering team. The innovative engineers and designs can help realize your ideas and transform the way you design your products. For more information, contact us here or learn more about our Design and Engineering services here.
