So You Want To Be An Engineer. Ray Floyd
the necessary courses to fulfill your dream - and be an “Engineer”.
Suggested Problems
1. Write a 250-300 word paper on the topic “I want to be a___________ Engineer” and support your choice.
2. Given a particular engineering path to follow, research that choice and determine what options are available for a specific career path. What courses would you have to take to follow the chosen path?
3. There have been three tragic accidents in the U.S. space program. What are the three and what problems occurred to cause the accidents?
Other Readings
Criteria for Accrediting Programs. ABET, Inc. www.abet.org.
Barger, M., Richard, G., and Snyder, M. (2010). Manufacturing Career Pathways. Manufacturing Engineering, April 2010.
Spencer, R. and Floyd, R. (2010). So, You Are Going To Be An Engineer? IEEE Potentials, May/June 2010.
Wickens, C. D., et al. (2004). An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering. Pearson-Prentice Hall.
Too often civic and government organizations announce and implement programs that fail to meet their intended goals, with great cost to the taxpayer. Once in a great while, industry will have a product that fails to meet market expectations, but not often. Even when industry has a failure, the overall product base of the company can often compensate for the single product failure to meet revenue goals. If they didn’t have such a distribution, they would soon be out of business. So what are the differences in the product development procedures that allow success on one hand or almost certainly ensure failure on the other?
Most successful products will have three important documents produced prior to the product ever reaching the design and implementation phases. The three are: 1) Market Requirements, 2) Product Specification, and 3) Product Test Plan. The first document is generally written by the Marketing Department (Sales, Product Planning, Marketing or similarly titled groups). In that document, the questions to be answered include: 1) what is the product need? 2) who are the users? 3) when is it needed? 4) what is the impact on current product sales? 5) what is the competition doing? 6) what are the sales projections and pricing? and 7) are there any special requirements (for example, language, accommodations, mean-time-to-failure, mean-time-to-repair, and service expectations). This list is not exhaustive, but gives you some idea about the content of the Market Requirements document.
The second document, Product Specification, is written by the Product Development group. The Product Specification is a detailed description of how the new product will meet all of the Market Requirements. If a particular requirement cannot be met due to time, cost, technology, or other factors, that requirement will be negotiated out of the Market Requirement with agreement between Marketing and Development. The Product Specification does not detail the product implementation method. That is left to the Product Design group responsible for the final product build. The Product Specification provides explicit statements (testable) for each area. For example, the Market Requirement may have stated the requirement for the new product to “operate on North American and European voltage and frequency.” The Product Specification cannot use the same words, as there are no specified values (cannot be tested for meeting the requirements). In the Product Specification, the requirement may be shown to be a product that operates on 50 to 60 hertz, 90 to 130 volts AC. These values can be validated.
The final document is the Test Plan. This document is written by the Product Test Group, and will put in place a series of tests to validate that the designed (and built) product will meet all stated requirements and specifications. In most cases, the tests of hardware will test to limits beyond the specifications to allow for part/product variability during the manufacturing process. The Test Plan may also specify that usability or field testing be conducted as lab testing cannot verify all aspects of the product anticipated use. This type of detailed testing is in addition to all the testing that will be done by the Development group during the development process.
A company’s marketing staff find a product need and convey this to the company’s development branch for consideration. If a trial is deemed reasonable, the proposed product is designed, reviewed and, if approved, a model is then developed and sent to the company’s testing organization. They in turn develop a test plan, which is reviewed with the developers, followed by a series of appropriate tests. Such tests may involve controlled environmental trials, noise levels, vibration, etc., conducted within lab facilities, or they may be conducted at field locations, especially where usability questions must be addressed.
Problems get corrected and testing is repeated. If the testing is successful, the product is released to manufacturing and initial production units, typically three to ensure for parts variability, are again subjected to planned testing. Once again, testing may include field testing in selected business environments. When the product successfully passes through the testing, it is released to full production and shipment to customers. Throughout this testing process, the product market is continually reviewed against Market Requirements and System Specifications in order to ensure the product is going to achieve its expected market, both in costs and revenue. This is a very brief description of the development, testing, and manufacturing cycle employed by many successful industries.
The market has many examples of successful companies, companies that exhibit fiscal responsibility, controlled product development and release, and quality control of the product release. If examined closely, it will be found that their good practices help them remain competitive and successful in the market today.
Industry is not above suffering from the lack of, or poor definition of, Market Requirements. Three famous failures come from the automotive world with the Ford Edsel, the DeLorean, and the Tucker. In the cases of the Edsel and the Tucker, the cars were of a futuristic design, and simply not accepted by the buyers. Ford Motor Company spent over $250 million for the Edsel, but in the end the car line was dropped due to the lack of buyer acceptance. The Tucker suffered from problems of too many user options, and failed after only 51 cars were built. In the case of the DeLorean, the cost of the automobile was far beyond any other at the time and thus suffered poor sales. The DeLorean may be best remembered as the automobile used in the movies Back to the Future.
The authors had the experience of being involved in a new process control computer system that had all appearances of being a unit with a wide open application base. Although the unit had good Market Requirements and a Product Specification that had gone through the normal rigorous process, somewhere something got lost. When the new product reached Product Test and entered usability testing one major flaw was found: the unit only had paper tape as an input/output device! There was no way to write, compile, or execute programs on the unit without using some other system to prepare the program tapes for loading. Totally unacceptable for the most simple applications, the problem had to be fixed before the system entered the market. The problem was corrected, and the product went on to be one of the industry’s most widely accepted process control systems.
In each of the situations described, the lack of good Market Requirements and Product Specifications could be seen as the primary reasons for the failure or poor results for the particular project.
The authors had the experience of what could be called “Ugly” projects. In the first case, the project was a new process control system which included, as an option, an arithmetic unit that included binary-coded-decimal (BCD) arithmetic and conversion hardware. As Marketing believed that some users would not want to include the cost of the arithmetic