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 Burnsville, 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.
If you’re leading a team that could use some help, fill out this form to receive a free project scope.
For some engineers, specifying a screw thread is no more than determining diameter and length and then searching through a parts catalog. For others, a custom thread is the difference between a successful surgical outcome with enhanced quality of life or a disappointing result that may require a revision surgery. A bone screw, whether used in a reconstructive, spinal, or other application, can be such an example.
A bone screw typically begins with a conical tip. The major diameter of the screw quickly increases to provide purchase in order to draw the screw into the bone. However, the minor diameter increases more gradually to reduce insertion force until the final portion is engaged into the bone. At this point the increasingly large tapered minor diameter provides a press fit into the outer (cortical) layer of the bone. This thread geometry is illustrated in Figure 1. The overall thread geometry is critical to providing stability to the affected area to allow bone growth and ultimately healing.
EAC’s Engineering and Design Services team recently worked on a project that clearly showed the advantage of using Creo versus SolidWorks to create this critical thread geometry. Several years ago the Engineering and Design Services team worked with an orthopedic company to create a series of bone screws varying in diameter and length for reconstructive surgeries. They used PTC Creo to create CAD models and drawings. The company was recently acquired by a global orthopedic corporation that used Solidworks 2016. The larger company insisted that the CAD models and drawings be recreated in SolidWorks 2016 for compatibility with internal corporate standards.
While working on the task, the Engineering and Design Services team found difficulty in reproducing the identical thread geometry using SolidWorks. Creo uses a single thread feature containing two individual sketches; one for thread profile and another for thread trajectory. This feature easily creates the varying thread tapers for the screw. Figure 2 shows the completed part and associated features in the model tree on the left hand side of the picture.
Recreating the same geometry in Solidworks requires 11 separate features and 8 sketches as shown in the model tree in Figure 3. Separate threaded features were required for the straight thread and the tapered thread at the tip of the screw. In addition, two helical curves were needed for each of the threaded features. One curve was required to provide the thread trajectory while the second helical curve was needed to fix the thread profile normal to the longitudinal axis of the screw.
The additional time to generate the needed features in Solidworks was significant for each part when compared to Creo and combined to substantial time savings for the entire project. This example illustrates why Creo is a superior application to SolidWorks.
The pressure to develop more and better products in less time is increasing. Your 3D CAD solution should enable you to provide your best work to produce your innovative ideas quickly and add advanced capabilities when you need them. The best tool for this is PTC Creo. PTC delivers the most scalable range or 3D CAD product development packages on the market today. Read more about why you should design using PTC Creo here.
The Internet of Things (IoT) sits atop a 3-legged stool. Each leg is as important as the next. If any are missing it all falls down. What are these all-important legs you ask? Strategy, Connected Things, and Platform.
All of the buzz and hype, all of the conversations I’ve had with manufacturing and product development clients, can be grouped into one of those categories. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have those three ‘legs’ supporting any IoT initiative. The hard part is keeping a balanced approach so each leg of the stool is supporting its fair share of the load. This is especially hard when you consider the ‘non-traditional’ product development players the IoT brings to the table. It’s shifting the value of products and transforming companies altogether.
Sometimes this transformation causes such a stir that people and companies tend to ignore the groundwork and adopt a more ad-hoc approach. That’s unfortunate because now, more than ever, business strategists, engineers, and IT need to come together to support a new breed of products.
Let’s build a (theoretical) stool. In the next few paragraphs I’ll explain EAC Connect Services’ 3-Legged Stool analogy.
First, consider Strategy — the ‘why’ leg of the stool. There needs to be a clear connection between any IoT efforts and the value they bring to core business strategy. Since the IoT is clearly shifting product value by adding more information about status, usage, location, efficiency, etc, there can be pretty clear connections made between corporate initiatives and enhanced products with sensors, connectivity and analytics. What’s challenging is bridging the gap created by the language used in different groups. We often see people rattle off business initiatives such as Grow Revenue, Improve Service, Increase Customer Engagement, and Reduce Scrap. Rarely does anyone jump up and say ‘IoT is the Answer.’ Interestingly, the IoT can directly impact each of those goals. The IoT can create new revenue streams based on data acquisition or alternatives to existing service models. It could even change the way products are sold — think ‘Product As A Service’ versus high capital expenditures. How could you be more engaged with customers than through an on-going subscription and monitoring program? And as for scrap, things like machine learning, predictive failure and real-time operational efficiency are just the tip of the iceberg.
Second, let’s consider Connected Things — the ‘what’ leg of the stool. Take a moment and look around the room…seriously, look around the room in which you currently reside. How many connected devices do you see? Now think about the connected devices and systems that you don’t see. I call this ‘pervasive connectivity.’ It’s the notion that connected things are rapidly outnumbering us. Analysts expect there will be about 7 connected and addressable things per person by 2020. These things may connect via bluetooth, WiFi, ethernet, long-range radio, cellular, and satellite signals amongst others. Couple this with ever-shrinking energy-efficient sensors piggybacking on existing products or embedded directly within new ones and we’re ready to analyze streams of data. This could happen real-time, locally or post-facto in the cloud. These connected and enabled things provide data junkies with more data than they know what to do with. And one cool twist is that the back-end systems are learning to mine and manage data on their own. In short, the ‘how’ of smart and connected products comes in layers — base product infrastructure, sensor systems and connectivity form the foundation. Then depending on the objective, analytics may occur real-time, be short-term local or happen ‘in the cloud.’
Third is Platform — the ‘how’ leg of the stool. Consider for a moment the possibilities of a truly scalable cloud IoT purpose-built platform. One where security, connectivity and flexibility are a part of the DNA and easy connection to other enterprise systems like PLM, CRM, MES and the like are not just a notion, but a reality. Picture a platform where these converging streams of data can be analyzed by a learning system that determines what ‘normal’ looks like and autonomously notifies other systems with the right information based on the audience or system. At this point, integrating service information through augmented reality seems like a natural extension and provides the next step in connected product development and the over-the-top service we’re all pursuing. And for some icing on our proverbial cake, how about the ability for ‘non-developers’ to quickly build role-specific dashboards and mashups without needing to write piles of code? While new platforms are springing up, ThingWorx is already in place and providing a central hub for the connected enterprise to meet and even exceed its business objectives.
While all three elements — Strategy, Connected Things, and true IoT platforms — seem somewhat elemental, balancing these will be central to the success of any IoT enabled business initiative. This is the approach we take at EAC through our Connect Services. Whether you’d like help in one, two or all three of these areas, we’d love to partner with you and see your next IoT project flourish.
Product development can be time consuming, difficult to manage, and slow to get up and running. Luckily, EAC Engineering Services is here to help transform the way you design your products. We offer a number of services to help you reduce time-to-market and improve project management to complete more projects. We can help with everything from customized mentoring to acting as your entire engineering team.
Milestone AV Technologies was in a position in which engineering resources were being fully utilized on active projects but they needed to make progress on a project that had been prototyped but stalled for nearly a year. Their solution? Find a trusted partner to deliver a thorough and mature design.
Milestone AV Technologies selected EAC as their trusted partner to deliver engineering and design services as well as manage the project.
Mike Ardito, Director of Product Development at Milestone AV Technologies said that in the little amount of time EAC Design Engineers worked on the project, they advanced it significantly. The level of maturity in the design exceeded his expectations.
“The first thing that was really evident when we started [working together] was that [EAC’s Design Engineer] was being very diligent from an engineering standpoint. We set up weekly meetings to check in, to give guidance, see what he was doing, and answer questions. It was clear that he was doing a lot of upfront work that would inform the design later. The engineering rigor and the quality of engineering work and the technical work, I got the impression was very good and the diligence was very high.”
Milestone needed to maintain critical client relationships by completing the project on-time and within budget. Leveraging the partnership with EAC allowed them to do exactly that. The project was completed on-time and within 10% of budget.
Like many companies, Milestone prefers to keep project work internal. However, if the opportunity presented itself, Ardito said he would have no issues coming back to EAC to based on his first experience with EAC.
Ardito explained that they look to outside design firms because they don’t have the internal resources available to manage the project but still want to move forward with it. He said “the worst possible case would be to go to somebody to do the external work and then have to spend a lot on internal resources managing that work.” He also explained that working with EAC, he was comfortable because he knew the project was in good hands and he would receive a quality output.
It was the first time Milestone AV Technologies reached out to another design firm in over a year. Ardito said, “The most valuable part of partnering with EAC goes back to having faith very early on that the technical rigor and detail was being addressed. I was assured that the EAC team was going to do the diligence necessary to create a good design.”
Milestone AV Technologies was able to complete a critical project 40% (8 months) faster by leveraging EAC’s Engineering Services group. Ardito explained that realistically, due to their workload they wouldn’t have been able to work on this project until the first quarter of 2016; EAC was able to deliver this project to them in October of 2015.
Ardito’s final comment was, “The level of service [EAC] provided, in terms of being available, the amount of attention EAC gave to the project before, during, and after was very good. It wasn’t the kind of thing where ‘we won this contract so we’re going to slap it out and not really follow up and make sure the customer is happy.’ It was just the right way to do business.”
