There is a large effort associated with Engineering outside the actual design effort. For us, Engineering support ranges from engineering application development to support functions such as product data management and product structuring. Data management has included direct material productivity efforts to determine ways to reduce product material cost. Product structuring efforts have included determination to reduce total part counts by part substitution and the development of engineering standards. Applications developed include both initial design applications, applications to support conversions, modifications and uprates and controls retrofits.
All design organizations need to keep their design talent focused on product design. We provide these support services for an original equipment manufacturer with a wide product range in multiple geographies. With more than 10,000 internal engineers, much off this work is done to support peaks in the client’s project workload.
We act as a an extension of the customers design teams executing engineering functions to support product specifications created by either the clients engineering team or the customer. This effort includes application engineering liaison with both the customer and the client design teams.
Engineering teams we have been imbedded in have reduced product cost by tens of millions of dollars. We have reduced the client’s requirement to hire full time personnel for peak project effort and have enabled the client to reduce the design delivery cycle by more than 20% for critical components.
