D&E(Design and Engineering) sector is a pillar in an enterprise. Almost all the product developments and customer engagement will go through the D&E sector. D&E integration cluster, an intersection point in company’s multi-business lines, is responsible to identify the critical value and steer the direction in the engagements. The amount of information and workload that need to be processed is massive, and we have to give our voice in time in order to guide the discussion properly. Therefore, being productive is essential for the D&E integration cluster to meet the expectation from the outside world. There are three apsects in my opinion which could help be productive in overall D&E organization.
Modular thinking
Problems and requests coming everyday seem to be new but they do have common patterns among each other. Modular thinking is a way to organize such massive amount of information inside our brain, which reduces the overhead and processing time for our brain capacity. This idea leverages the power of commonality and framework. For example, thinking about where the problems comes from could immediately identify the common patterns in the organization. Suppliers’ questions and requests are usaully associated to the discussion of product specifications. If a methodology and way of working are established, then we follow the same approach to estimate the impact of the suppelier’s change as well as to give the feedback to suppliers. Customers’ questions in general are more linked to understanding and solving issues. If a similar question has been asked, there might be already a solution available. Searching around and adapting the solutions to your problems makes life easier.
Modular thinking is not only just to identify the common patterns and swap the elements within the same module but also connect the dots between different modules in the framework. Taking the product improvement for example, a product improvment is normally initiated by customer request because of unsatisfication on the certain parts of product. To estimate if the change of product could meet the customer requestments, D&E needs to predict the product performance based on the change of part. To ensure the change is executable, D&E also needs to look internally to see if function clusters support this change, which could leads the conversation even to the supplier side. As a result, a product improvement is seen as a big work with many parties invovled. If someone could see the connection between different mouldes and know which change or outcome goes to where, it will speed up the process for final deliverables.