How can automotive manufacturers improve engineering productivity?
It’s an inspiring time for the automotive industry. Innovations through electrification, automation, and more are revolutionizing the industry like never before. Vehicles continue to be more comfortable, safer, and fuel-efficient, while new service offerings present further opportunities for innovation. All of this relies on the engineering team’s ability to deliver. Unfortunately, engineers regularly lose productivity to non-value-added tasks that not only rob them of their ability to innovate, but also threaten their company’s ability to compete, differentiate, and grow. Imagine the potential of identifying and removing the most common non-value-add activities engineers face and empowering them to focus on better vehicles, components, and systems.
This research examines how engineers spend their time, where they lose productivity, and the impact on the business. It then identifies solutions and approaches to reduce time wasters. Based on a survey of 228 manufacturers across industries, this report focuses on automotive companies and looks at the challenges and opportunities from their perspective.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Siemens (registration required).
This report is based off the research published in The Business Value of Reducing Engineering Time Wasters which takes a look across all industries.
For other industry-specific related research, read our Reducing Engineering Time Wasters reports for:
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Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Product Development is Critical to Business Strategies
- The Time Wasters
- Implications of Time Wasters to the Business
- A Solution to Avoid Time Wasters
- Business Value from PLM
- Extending PLM Use Results in Greater Satisfaction
- How Companies Implement PLM
- Additional Values Due to the Cloud
- Conclusions
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Engineers Impact Business Success
Automotive companies’ ability to deliver exceptional offerings is critical to success. Likewise, their engineers are crucial to ensuring vehicles, components, and systems have what it takes to succeed in the market. Therefore, empowering engineers is key to the successful execution of business strategies.
Too Many Time Wasters
Unfortunately, engineers report spending too much time on non-value-added work with too many interruptions, taking them away from critical innovation work. Furthermore, 97% of surveyed automotive companies say this loss in engineering productivity comes at a significant business cost due to missed deadlines, higher costs, and less innovation. To overcome productivity losses, one approach is to manage product data and processes better and make it accessible to those who need it, when they need it.
Reclaiming Wasted Time
This report identifies major engineering time wasters in the automotive industry. It explores how companies of all sizes reclaim lost time by examining the use and value of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solutions to centralize data, manage processes, and collaborate better. PLM users reported fewer changes due to outdated information and errors, significantly reducing non-value-added work and shortening development times. This report also examines how companies select and use PLM solutions, including cloud-based implementations.
The Time Wasters
What Slows Engineers Down?
The graph identifies the top engineering time wasters automotive companies face. The findings highlight how much engineers waste on non-value-added work. They need better ways to automate tedious tasks so they can focus more energy on adding value.
Limited Reuse
Vehicles have become increasingly complicated, evolving into complex interconnected systems of mechanical components, electronics, and software. The more engineers can leverage compliant, proven, and tested subsystems and components, the more time they will save. This also reduces the risk of introducing errors and missing requirements. However, the number of components across multiple engineering domains and suppliers, makes it very difficult to find needed data, and searching for it wastes valuable time. Also, platform designs require managing complex configurations which consumes even more time. To avoid these issues, engineers need suitable methods for finding what they need and managing configurations.
Time Preparing for Manufacturing
Engineers also invest significant time gathering all required data to release to manufacturing. Any data inaccuracies can result in costly scrap, rework, and delays. Further, any changes significantly impact production, especially when multiple facilities are affected. Engineers need ways to quickly gather all necessary data with its dependencies, and automated workflows to manage the release process, especially when relying on third parties such as suppliers or OEMs.
Interruptions
Constant interruptions to answer questions, share data, and provide updates also slows engineers down. These interruptions break an engineer’s train of thought and take them away from other work.
Redoing Work
Engineers also waste efforts redoing work. They recreate it when they can’t find it or must fix errors due to outdated information. Better methods to centralize data would help get that time back.
Poor Collaboration
Finally, companies find that poor collaboration also wastes time. This is especially critical for automotive companies given the number of engineering domains involved.
A Solution to Avoid Time Wasters
How PLM Reduces Time Wasters
We will now focus on how PLM can be a potential solution to reduce engineering time-wasters. Automotive companies that have implemented PLM experience many benefits (see lower graphic).
Engineers at automotive companies pointed to centralizing data as a top PLM benefit. Centralizing data makes it easier to find and allows them to effectively manage processes, such as engineering changes and release processes. They can also improve collaboration and traceability across projects.
More automated processes and centralized data mean PLM users waste less time searching for data, and data stays up-to-date, so they don’t have to recreate work if they can’t find it or redo it because they used outdated information. Also, centralized data means others have easier access to what they need, when they need it, so engineers are interrupted less. This is especially critical with the multidomain systems typical in the automotive industry.
Engineering Changes
On top of this, respondents from automotive companies report that PLM reduces many sources of changes (see graph on right). Engineering changes resulting from these issues squander time, taking them away from innovation efforts that add more value. Avoiding these issues will save engineers significant time.
Conclusions
Reclaiming Lost Time
Automotive companies prioritize their future growth and sustained success on winning in the marketplace with better, differentiated offerings. To support this, they can boost their product development capabilities significantly by eliminating time wasters that consume engineers’ valuable time.
Automotive companies find that PLM can empower their engineers to innovate by significantly reducing engineers’ time on non-value-added tasks. As a result, they can enjoy a competitive advantage. In addition, technological advances, such as cloud-based offerings, can reduce implementation time, cost, and difficulty, making PLM more accessible.
Recommendations
Next Steps
Based on industry experience and research for this report, Tech-Clarity offers the following recommendations to automotive companies:
- Consider the business impact of engineering time wasters on your company and make investments to minimize them. Empowering engineers to focus more time on value-added work will enable you to get to market faster with better, more differentiated offerings.
- Consider how challenging it can be to find and recruit engineering talent in today’s business climate. Freeing engineers from time-wasting tasks can help take some pressure off your existing staff, improving their work environment and productivity, increasing job satisfaction, and reducing the need to add more staff.
- Look at PLM as a potential solution to reduce engineering time wasters. Automotive companies report that PLM offers benefits such as centralizing data, managing processes, and improving collaboration. This frees engineers from tasks that waste their time so they can focus more on engineering and innovation.
- Use PLM for more than managing data. Those most satisfied with PLM also use it to manage engineering change processes, access control, requirements, and release processes.
- Extend the use of PLM to a broader audience beyond engineering. Those most satisfied with it include management, manufacturing, quality, and sales as users.
- Select a solution that has the flexibility to configure to your processes. An overwhelming 74% who found the implementation easy, identified this as helpful to the implementation.
- Consider a cloud solution. Interestingly, 78% of those who implemented a cloud solution considered the deployment easy and implemented it in half the time required by those using a non-cloud solution.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Siemens (registration required).
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