What I Learned: Mechatronic Product Development and the Talking Refrigerator

What I learned this week … came from the keynote and press conference at IBM‘s Rational Software Conference (RSC2009). IBM is talking about how to help companies develop and manage today’s smarter products. What was surprising to me is that the conference is focused on developing software – not physical products – but that a lot of the conversations focused on manufacturers and product development. Are we finally getting to the point where ALM (application lifecycle management) and PLM (product lifecycle management) can be discussed in the same sentence?

A Little about “Mechatronic” Products

According to IBM’s keynote, 70% of products have embedded control systems. This means that your next refrigerator may just be “smarter” than your first PC.  OK, that really depends on how old you are, but my first PC wasn’t all that smart. The point is that a traditional mechanical product has evolved to incorporate a significant amount of software. Engineering and product development has evolved from mechanical design to a combination of mechanical and electrical design (like a “dumb” refrigerator) to mechanical, electrical, and software design in more sophisticated products (like a smart, talking refrigerator that automatically adjusts itself based on usage, season, time of day, or other factors). Another statistic quoted was that 90% of all innovation in the automotive industry is in software. While I can’t validate the percentages, the sentiment is definitely true. Many products today would not be what they are without software.

So What’s the Problem with Mechatronic Design?

There are three very distinct worlds within product development:

• Mechanical Design – The physics of the product. For the refrigerator it is the body, the handles, the shelves, the compressor (or parts of it), and other physical aspects of the product.
• Electrical Design – The electronics in the product. This can be as simple as wiring, more complex like a printed circuit board (PCB), or maybe a fully programmable chip or processor (that in turn requires software).
• Software Design-The brains of the product. This can included software algorithms that are embedded on the chips of the product, or could include programmable functions of the product. Hint – ever notice that some of your products you didn’t expect to hook up to your computer have a USB port? It might just be an indicator that your product (perhaps your tv set today, but maybe a lot of other products in the future) is set up to get software updates from the Internet.

So why is this a problem when developing products? The fact that there are three distinct design elements of a product is not the problem. The problem is that each of these design elements has it’s own lifecycle, and each impacts the other. If the mechanics, electronics, and software were unrelated then they could all be nicely designed in parallel without issues. Unfortunately, what makes today’s products “smart” is exactly what makes them hard to design and manage – the software is a key part in controlling how the product’s electrical and mechanical elements function.

Implications for Manufacturers?

The implications for manufacturers today is that product design is getting more difficult (as if it wasn’t hard enough). Processes like change and configuration management that are already hard for one discipline (mechanical, electrical, or software) need to be elevated to the systems level to encompass the whole product. Teams working on individual aspects need to collaborate earlier in the design process.

This will not happen overnight, but the companies that get this right will have a tremendous advantage in bringing high quality products to market, and avoiding late conflicts between the different disciplines that drive high product development cost and product introduction delays.  This is the future of product development, and today’s disjointed processes will not be competitive when the leading companies figure this one out.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. I will post later this week on what I hear from IBM in regards to addressing mechatronic design issues, and what their vision is for addressing ALM and PLM holistically. Let me know what you think.

NOTE:OK, this picture is not a real talking refrigerator, I admit it. This is a toy. But toys are just one more example of mechatronic products, and they will continue to get more sophisticated (incorporating physical motion, Internet connectivity, and “thinking” over time).