Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE

I count myself as fortunate to be just old enough to have experienced a large engineering company run by engineers. A company where the accountants were just another support service for top management. Quality control was just another department like any other—it didn't try to run the company. And look at what we built—magnificent submarines, aircraft, tanks, machinery, space shuttles, lunar vehicles, and countless other tributes to engineering creativity and innovation. Where is innovation on such a grand scale now? Mired in the morass of process and "billable hours." The last few exceptions are the small startups that are still run by engineers. And even they must pay tribute to their accounting (venture capital) masters. If this trend continues, America will soon find itself the next new third world nation, bereft of any technological assets.

Jonathan Hujsak, Ramona, CA

Regarding your editorial on activity-based costing for engineers, I would send the sympathy card to the company that did NOT do any tracking of hours and remained largely in the dark about their true engineering costs. A competitor that manages those expensive engineering hours better and makes fact-based decisions will probably eat into the market share of the company that thinks they can manage what they don't know and decides with guesses, tradition, or emotion. Yes, accounting of any type can be done ineptly. But even so, it may be less inept than having no real cost knowledge in the first place or making bad guesses.

And yes, people can go too far in letting numbers do their thinking for them. But if your company is already managed that way, you probably already have bigger problems. I prefer to think of it along more positive lines. First, whatever you measure tends to improve. When the organization gets visibility on where a department's hours are going, some lights go on. You might decide all those cattle call standing meetings do more harm than good. You might make meetings more targeted, more selective, and more brief.

Second, you might discover, or confirm, what you already suspect about your staff doing another department's work. And you will have the ammunition to convince management when you tell them they are paying for 10 mechanical engineers, but they are only getting the work of eight, and why. Third, you might even try to align how those hours (dollars) are spent in relationship to the business you are in, your mission, and your goals. Fourth, you can set up charge numbers to be in alignment with adjustment knobs of interest. Finally, the numbers usually don't need to be perfect. Just "good enough" to tell you volumes.

Beyond corporate decision-making, I would think that a department or project manager, not just the "bean counters," would want to have a solid idea how all of those expensive engineering hours are spent. And if the results are openly discussed, it raises the consciousness of the staff about their valuable time so they make better choices in their personal engineering process. Mostly, knowing true costs helps an organization move from being sloppy to focused, and moves engineering from being an endless "activity" to completing quality projects on time and on budget.

Charles E. Kinzer, San Luis Obispo, CA