The organization of a business enterprise can have a major influence on how effectively design and product development are carried out. There are two fundamental ways for organizing a business: with regard to function or with respect to projects.
A brief listing of the functions that encompass engineering practice is given in Fig. 1. At the top of this ladder is research, whi
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| Fig 1 Spectrum of engineering functions. |
A project is a grouping of activities aimed at accomplishing a defined objective, like introducing a particular product into the marketplace. It requires certain activities: identifying customer needs, creating product concepts, building prototypes, designing for manufacture, and so on. These tasks require people with different functional specialties. As we shall see, the two organizational arrangements, by function or by project, represent two disparate views of how the specialty talents of people should be organized.
An important aspect of how an enterprise should be organized is concerned with the links between individuals. These links have to do with:
1) Reporting relationships: A subordinate is concerned about who his or her supervisor is, since the supervisor influences evaluations, salary increases, promotions, and work assignments.
2) Financial arrangements: Another type of link is budgetary. The source of funds to advance the project, and who controls these funds, is a vital consideration.
3) Physical arrangement: Studies have shown that communication between individuals is enhanced if their offices are within 50 feet of each other. Thus, physical layout, whether individuals share the same office, floor, or building, or are even in the same country, can have a major impact on the spontaneous encounters that occur and hence the quality of the communication. The ability to communicate effectively is most important to the success of a product development project.
We now discuss the most common types of organizations for carrying out product development activities. As each is presented, examine it with regard to the links between people.
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| Fig 2 Example of a functional organization. |
A Typical Organization by Functions
Figure 2 shows an organization chart of a typical manufacturing company of modest size organized along conventional functional reporting lines. All research and engineering report to a single vice president; all manufacturing activity is the responsibility of another vice president. Take the time to read the many functions under each vice president that are needed even in a manufacturing enterprise that is modest in size.Note that each function is a column in the organizational chart. These reporting chain columns are often called “silos” or “stove pipes” because they can represent barriers to communication between functions. A chief characteristic of a functional organization is that each individual has only one boss. By concentrating activities in units of common professional background, there are economies of scale, opportunities to develop deep expertise, and clear career paths for specialists. Generally, people gain satisfaction from working with colleagues who share similar professional interests. Since the organizational links are primarily among those who perform similar functions, formal interaction between different functional units, as between engineering and manufacturing, is forced to the level of the unit manager or higher.
Concentrating technical talent in a single organization produces economies of scale and opportunities to develop in-depth technical knowledge. This creates an efficient organization for delivering technical solutions, but because of communication problems inherent in this structure it may not be the optimum organization for effective product development. It may be acceptable for a business with a narrow and slowly changing set of product lines, but the inevitable slow and bureaucratic decision making that this type of structure imposes can be a problem in a dynamic product situation. Unless effective communication can be maintained between engineering and manufacturing and marketing, it will not produce the most cost-effective and customer-oriented designs.
Organization by Projects
The other extreme in organizational structure is the project organization, where people with the various functional abilities needed for the product development are grouped together to focus on the development of a specific product or product line (Fig. 3). These people often come on special assignment from the functional units of the company. Each development team reports to a project manager, who has full authority and responsibility for the success of the project. Thus the project teams are autonomous units, charged with creating a specific product. The chief advantage of a project organization is that it focuses the needed talents exclusively on the project goal, and it eliminates issues with communication between functional units by creating teams of different functional specialists. Thus, decision-making delays are minimized. Another advantage of the project organization is that members of a project team are usually willing to work outside of their specialty area to get the work done when bottlenecks arise in completing the many tasks required to complete a design. They do not have to wait for some functional specialist to finish her current assignment to work on their project. Therefore, working in a project team develops technical breadth and management skills.
A product created by a project organization is not as economical in its utilization of scarce technical expertise as the functional organization. While an autonomous project team will create a product much more quickly than the functional team, it often is not as good a design as would be produced by the functional design organization.7 The problem arises when the project team really believes that it is an independent unit and ignores the existing knowledge base of the organization. It tends to “reinvent the wheel,” ignores company standards, and generally does not produce the most cost-effective, reliable design. However, the project organization is very common in start-up companies, where indeed, the project and the company are synonymous.
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| Fig 3 A simplified project organization. |
In large companies a project organization often is time limited; once the goal of the project is achieved, the people are reassigned to their functional units. This helps to address a major disadvantage of this type of organization: that technical experts tend to lose their “cutting edge” functional capabilities with such intense focus on the project goal.
Hybrid Organizations
Midway between these two types of organizations is the hybrid organization, often called the matrix organization, which attempts to combine the advantages of the functional and project organizations. In the matrix organization each person is linked to others according to both their function and the project they work on. As a consequence, each individual has two supervisors, one a functional manager and the other a project manager. While this may be true in theory, in practice either the functional manager or the project manager predominates.8 In the lightweight project organization the functional links are stronger than the project links (Fig. 4(a)). In this matrix the functional specialties are shown along the y-axis and the various project teams along the x-axis.
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| Fig 4 (a) A lightweight project organization; (b) a heavyweight project organization. |
The project managers assign their personnel as required by the project teams. While the project managers are responsible for scheduling, coordination, and arranging meetings, the functional managers are responsible for budgets, personnel matters, and performance evaluations. Although an energetic project manager can move the product development along faster than with a strict functional organization because there is one person who is dedicated and responsible for this task, in fact he or she does not have the authority to match the responsibility. A lightweight matrix organization may be the worst of all possible product development organizations because the top management may be deluded into thinking that they have adopted a modern project management approach when in effect they have added one layer of bureaucracy to the traditional functional approach.
In the heavyweight matrix organization the project manager has complete budgetary authority, makes most of the resource allocation decisions, and plays a strong role in evaluating personnel (Fig. 4(b)). Although each participant belongs to a functional unit,10 the functional manager has little authority and control over project decisions. However, he continues to write his people’s reviews, and they return to his organization at the end of the project. The functional organization or the lightweight project organization works well in a stable business environment, especially one where the product predominates in its market because of technical excellence. A heavyweight project organization has advantages in introducing radically new products, especially where speed is important. Some companies have adopted the project form of organization where the project team is an organizationally separate unit in the company. Often this is done when they plan to enter an entirely new product area that does not fit within the existing product areas. Sometimes this has been done when embarking on a major defense project that requires special security procedures apart from the commercial business.
We have mentioned the concern that an empowered product development team may get carried away with its freedom and ignore the corporate knowledge base to create a fast-to-market product that is less than optimum in some aspects such as cost or reliability. To prevent this from occurring, the product team must clearly under-stand the boundaries on its authority. For example, the team may be given a limit on the cost of tooling, which if exceeded requires approval from an executive outside the team. Or, they may be given an approved parts list, test requirements, or vendors from which to make their selections, and any exceptions require higher approval. It is important to define the boundaries on team authority early in the life of the team so that it has a clear understanding of what it can and cannot do. Moreover, the stage-gate review process should provide a deterrent to project teams ignoring important company procedures and policy.
Concurrent Engineering Teams
The conventional way of doing product design has been to carry out all of the steps serially. Thus, product concept, product design, and product testing have been done prior to process planning, manufacturing system design, and production. Commonly these serial functions have been carried out in distinct and separate organizations with little interaction between them. Thus, it is easy to see how the design team will make decisions, many of which can be changed only at great cost in time and money, without adequate knowledge of the manufacturing process.
Starting in the 1980s, as companies met increasing competitive pressure, a new approach to integrated product design evolved, which is called concurrent engineering . The impetus came chiefly from the desire to shorten product development time, but other drivers were the improvement of quality and the reduction of product life cycle costs. Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. With this approach, product developers, from the outset, consider all aspects of the product life cycle, from concept to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements. A main objective is to bring many viewpoints and talents to bear in the design process so that these decisions will be valid for downstream parts of the product development cycle like manufacturing and field service. Toward this end, computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools have been very useful. Concurrent engineering has three main elements: cross-functional teams, parallel design, and vendor partnering.
Of the various organizational structures for design that were discussed previously, the heavyweight project organization, usually called just a cross-functional design team or an integrated product and process product development (IPPD) team, is used most frequently with concurrent engineering. Having the skills from the functional areas embedded in the team provides for quick and easy decision making, and aids in communication with the functional units. For cross-functional teams to work, their leader must be empowered by the managers of the functional units with decision-making authority. It is important that the team leader engender the loyalty of the team members toward the product and away from the functional units from which they came. Functional units and cross-functional teams must build mutual respect and understanding for each other’s needs and responsibilities. The importance of teams in current design practice is devoted to an in-depth look at team behavior.
Parallel design, sometimes called simultaneous engineering, refers to each functional area implementing their aspect of the design at the earliest possible time, roughly in parallel. For example, the manufacturing process development group starts its work as soon as the shape and materials for the product are established, and the tooling development group starts its work once the manufacturing process has been selected. These groups have had input into the development of the product design specification and into the early stages of design. Of course, nearly continuous communication between the functional units and the design team is necessary in order to know what the other functional units are doing. This is decidedly different from the old practice of completely finishing a design package of drawings and specifications before transmitting it to the manufacturing department.
Vendor partnering is a form of parallel engineering in which the technical expertise of the vendor for certain components is employed as an integral member of the cross-functional design team. Traditionally, vendors have been selected by a bidding process after the design has been finalized. In the concurrent engineering approach, key suppliers known for proficient technology, reliable delivery, and reasonable cost are selected early in the design process before the parts have been designed. Generally, these companies are called suppliers, rather than vendors, to emphasize the changed nature of the relationship. A strategic partnership is developed in which the supplier becomes responsible for both the design and production of components, in return for a major portion of the business. Rather than simply supplying standard components, a supplier can partner with a company to create customized components for a new product. Supplier partnering has several advantages. It reduces the amount of component design that must be done in-house, it integrates the supplier’s manufacturing expertise into the design, and it ensures a degree of allegiance and cooperation that should minimize the time for receipt of components.
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