UK Prime Minister Launches Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

By BIMAL DHARSI | Published: NOVEMBER 17, 2011

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering will be awarded every other year to an individual or team of up to three, of any nationality, responsible for advancing the application of engineering knowledge. The prize is worth $1.6 million (£1 million).

United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron said he hopes it will carry the same stature as the Nobel Prize. “For too long Britain’s economy has been over-reliant on consumer debt and financial services,” Cameron said.

“I hope this prize will go some way to inspire and excite young people about engineering, so that they dream of becoming engineers as they once did in the age of Stephenson and Brunel.”

The fund behind it will be managed by an independent trust chaired by John Browne, Royal Academy of Engineering president, and former group chief executive of British Petroleum.

Commenting on the prize, Browne said, engineering “underpins every aspect of our lives,” adding that it forms a “bridge between scientific discovery and commercial application.

“Too often the engineers behind the most brilliant innovations remain hidden. The Queen Elizabeth Prize aims to change that. It will celebrate, on an international scale, the very best engineering in the world.”

There is a recognized shortfall of qualified engineers in the UK. This scheme is welcome news and it’s hoped it will attract more graduates into the engineering profession.

New Regs Tighten Compliance for Medical Devices Manufacturers

By AMY HORGAN | Published: NOVEMBER 16, 2011

There are amazing things going on in the medical devices industry today, as evidenced by stories of war vets returning from Afghanistan with prosthetic limbs, and the 50-year-old Englishman who last month become the world’s first patient to have a Smartphone built into an artificial arm.

But as these medical devices become more common and complex, so are demands from consumers and government agencies about product quality and environmental safety.

Just within the past few months, compliance to RoHS, the European Restriction of Hazardous Substances regulation, has become a serious challenge for medical device manufacturers. It’s a challenge that could have very expensive and damaging consequences for companies which fail to comply.

RoHS first went into effect in 2006. It mandates that producers of certain categories of electrical and electronic equipment are not allowed to place products on the European market if they contain six banned substances: lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenylethers flame retardants.

This past July the European Union revised RoHS to include previously-exempt medical devices manufacturers. Beginning in 2014 the new RoHS recast will apply to medical devices and monitoring and control instruments.

But RoHS isn’t the only new regulation targeting the medical devices industry. Another is theSustainability Scorecard from the California-based Kaiser Permanente health care organization. This scorecard—similar to Walmart’s sustainability index—requires that medical suppliers provide environmental data for equipment and products used in Kaiser’s hospitals, medical offices and other facilities. Add to that the EU’s 2007 REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) and the need for effective product data management for the medical devices industry has never been more critical, or challenging.

As Jim Brown, industry analyst with Tech Clarity, notes in Tech-Clarity Perspective: Making Product Development Trade-offs Designing Products for Compliance, Cost, and Sustainability,the number-one difficulty for device makers involves collecting timely and accurate data from suppliers. Brown says that these new standards have registered little improvement in comparison with previous benchmarks over the last two years.

On the upside, Brown says, some other top concerns—lack of awareness and lack of understanding of compliance requirements—seem to have eased. This shows that the industry is making progress. Other encouraging news, according to Brown, is that fewer companies are suffering from lack of resources to address environmental compliance.

Failing to comply with regulations is more than a slap on the wrist. At the very least companies can face recalls, brand damage, costly redesigns, and scrapped parts. The stakes are high, with potentially millions of dollars of revenue at risk.

In order to satisfy regulations, manufacturers must provide regulators with detailed reports demonstrating product compliance, while keeping up with frequent changes in product designs, parts, suppliers, and in the regulations themselves – an enormous data management challenge.

Manufacturers defining supplier data-collection needs have to factor in ever-changing environmental regulations. Just as environmental compliance is a process and not an event, the same is true for environmental data acquisition and management.  The data acquisition process is particularly important to get right, as the need for substance and material data from suppliers is growing.

Successful compliance programs require both a strategy and a process to improve data capture to attain the information needed and continually improve upon it without overburdening already scarce resources.

How is your company dealing with the challenge of regulatory compliance and data management?

Further information:

• RoHS2 Compliance: Is Your Company Ready?
• Best Practices for Collecting Product Material and Compliance Data

Back to the Future II Nike MAG Shoes make $4.7 Million for Parkinson’s

By JILL SHEPHERD | Published: NOVEMBER 15, 2011

In Back to the Future II, Marty McFly steps out of a DeLorean into 2015. Doc Brown immediately hands him new clothes, and Marty jams his feet into ultramodern Nike MAG shoes – the laces tighten automatically and the Nike logo lights up.

It’s a memorable scene and the first in the movie to show us what kind of technology could be possible in the future. Re-watching this film today, I have lots of “does that exist now?” or “can we do that?” moments.

In the 22 years since Back to the Future II was made product development has undergone a lot of changes. Many consumer goods today typically have electronic, mechanical and software elements. The combination of all three (mechatronics) allows us to get closer to the innovation we see in the movie.

The scene with the automatic laces was shot using holes in the ground and a prop man underneath the street pulling the laces on cue. But within the next few years we could be seeing the real thing on shelves everywhere.

“These projects stretch you and push you to do things you normally wouldn’t do,” says Tinker Hatfield, Nike VP Design & Innovation. “But the sensory part, where a shoe is triggered to wake up… I’d say it’s going to be about 2015 when we have a shoe that does what that shoe did.”

Watch 2011 Nike MAG | The Full Story

Nike recently auctioned off 1510 pairs of the MAG shoes on eBay and all proceeds were donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The eBay sale netted $4.7 million, which was matched by Google Inc. founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki.

You can take a look at the shoe on Nike’s website, and while you’re there check out some of thelive Nike MAG auctions.

If you missed the opportunity to get a pair, don’t worry. Tinker Hatfield eludes (again) to a release of a self-lacing version in 2015 in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.

4 Reasons to Keep Engineering in a Box

By PETER SUTTON | Published: NOVEMBER 15, 2011

To get the most out of your design process, it is important to optimize how your company utilizes its engineering staff. As a former engineer in the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) world I have four tips on how to (or how not to…) “maximize” your engineers’ time while improving the skills of your workers and generating additional revenue streams.

#1: Eliminating collaboration reduces time spent in meetings. To reduce unnecessary “discussion” about designs, innovative managers can apply a variety of techniques. One of my favorite techniques is to implement different design tools, none of which work together, throughout the team. This way, you not only prevent designers from collaborating, in the off-chance an outsider does manage to penetrate the design process, contamination is limited to a single system.

Fact: The best way to encourage a healthy design process is to ensure that there are open lines of communication within the design group. Hand-offs should be smooth, not “thrown over the wall.” And standardization on common platforms and programs is a proven way to help to promote collaboration, shorten time to market and improve quality.

#2: Avoiding customer feedback shortens design cycles. One surefire way to reduce your time to market is staying focused… staying focused and not letting people with opinions, like customers for example, distract you. Who do they think they are anyways?

Fact: Getting customer feedback throughout the design process saves you time and money. Yes, it costs money to get customer feedback. Yes, it takes time to collect and analyze customer feedback. But a product with a slightly longer time to market that hits the mark is infinitely more profitable than one that doesn’t sell. Need another reason? Making changes in the design cycle is MUCH cheaper than trying to make changes after the product is in production.

#3: Ignoring problems promotes problem solving skills. Sure the manufacturing guys might find ways to improve the design for production, but there’s no need to change the original design. When you are ready to release the next version, manufacturing will probably remember what they did last time…

Fact: Pushing manufacturing changes back to design, essentially marrying the eBOM and mBOM, ensures that your next version will be that much better. And in cases where parts are used across multiple assemblies, these changes create cascading efficiencies. Creating bridges between design and manufacturing also grows the skills of your design team, showing them what does and does not work in production.

#4: Faulty parts generate service revenues. Aftermarket Service, or Service Life Cycle Management, can be a profitable business, especially when you have parts that constantly break. One way to ensure that this business is not threatened is to make sure that no one replaces the faulty parts with ones that actually last.

Fact: Poor quality is a proven way to lose customers. By making sure that service informs engineering of faulty parts, this problem can be addressed, increasing both the quality of your product and the satisfaction of your customers.

There you have it, four guaranteed ways to “improve” your design process through engineering isolation. But seriously, as you look at the roles that various groups play, or could play, in your design process remember that the designs we engineers create are only as good as the information we have.

Extending design beyond engineering, with collaboration and active downstream feedback, can only help to improve your end results.

Feds Raid Gibson Guitar amid Allegations of Illegal Rare-Wood Exports

By SCOTT MCCARLEY | Published: NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Gibson Guitar is best known for the legendary Les Paul guitars and the musicians who play them, including Jimmy Paige, B.B. King, Slash and Paul McCartney. But lately, Gibson’s been feeling the heat from the Feds after being raided on allegations of illegally importing ebony from India and failure to comply with the Lacey Act. This is the second time in two years that Gibson factories have been raided for non-compliance with this regulation.

The Lacey Act bans the import of illegally harvested wildlife and plants. It requires companies to make detailed disclosures about wood imports and forbids the purchase of goods exported in violation of a foreign country’s laws. And, as with other regulations, the price of non-compliance is high. Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson, told the Wall Street Journal that the government raids over alleged violations of the Lacey Act have cost Gibson roughly $1 million in seized products and production disruptions alone.

The story has many interesting facets and demonstrates the risks manufacturers face from evolving compliance regulations and the complexities involved with a global supply chain.

The Lacey Act requires Gibson and others like it to track every species of wood used in all components of its guitars. It’s not enough to know that the guitar has spruce and maple in it. It’s also necessary to know what the bridge is made of, for instance. Records must show where wood is harvested and where components are made.

Numerous other regulations—such as REACH, RoHS, CA Proposition 65 and even the new Conflict Minerals law—require manufacturers to collect the same type of information for all components, whether it is to ensure that products don’t contain hazardous levels of toxic substances or to prevent use of minerals mined in areas of armed conflict and human rights abuses.

On the surface, collecting this information may seem daunting, though it need not be.

Today’s PLM (product lifecycle management) solutions and associated technologies enable manufacturers to automate the collection of product data from the supply chain and then report against multiple compliance requirements.

It’s good business for manufacturers to know exactly what’s in their products and where it came from. The value of this data goes far beyond compliance. For example, only when armed with this information can manufactures properly mitigate the risk of supply-chain disruptions and forecast cost changes based on fluctuations in the price of rare materials.

A robust PLM system with an exhaustive audit trail for each product component— showing who made it, what it is made of, and where it was made—can provide the due diligence necessary to prove compliance, and help identify and resolve potential compliance issues before they become costly problems.

Gibson continues to make headlines as the company responds to the allegations and the government presses on with a criminal investigation. Gibson contends it has not violated the Lacey Act.

Juszkiewicz defends Gibson in a Huffington post editorial. “The recent raid of Gibson, however, did not come about because the wood was illegally harvested. Rather, the U.S. government alleges that the wood was imported in violation of an Indian export restriction designed to keep wood finishing work in India. To make matters worse, although the Indian government certified that the wood was properly and legally exported under this law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service substituted its own opinion and reinterpreted Indian law.”

Scott Paul, a Greenpeace official in New York responsible for forestry issues, sums up Gibson’s positive environmental efforts and the complexity of compliance in a Wall Street Journal article, pointing out that Gibson has done “great work” to promote better forestry practices. The question, he said, goes to whether Gibson did everything possible to avoid buying wood from dubious sources.

US Army Corps of Engineers Deploys Complex Math along the Columbia River

By LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN | Published: NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Most people don’t think about the complexity behind the electricity that’s supplied to their home or work. We flick a switch. The lights go on or off. Simple, right? Well, not quite. As covered in the November 7^th Forbes article “The High-Stakes Math Behind the West’s Greatest River”, there’s an enormous amount of data and complex calculations that go into meeting that demand for power. Harold Opitz, hydrologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s Northwest River Forecast Center, told Forbes, “I can never have too much data.” That’s because if Opitz doesn’t have enough data, and his calculations aren’t accurate, it could mean lights-out for millions of American households.

The Northwest River Forecast Center is one organization in a larger group, headed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, helping to manage over 100 large dams and hundreds of smaller installations along the mighty Columbia River. Together these structures provide a number of functions, but the chief one is hydropower generation to feed our electricity demand. In fact, theGrand Coulee Dam is North America’s largest power plant, not only providing 600,000 acres of irrigation to the Pacific Northwest, but generating nearly 7,000 megawatts of electricity at full capacity. To put this in perspective, just one megawatt can power 5,000 computers.

Effective operation of these giant dams depends on precise forecasting of weather, river and dam behaviors. It has to be incredibly accurate. As reported by Forbes: “As large as the dams are, their margins of error are miniscule and operating them takes unerring foresight and subtle management: let too much water fill reservoirs and a rainstorm might flood Portland; keep the reservoirs too empty and you’ll parch farmers. Send too much water over a dam’s spillway and you’ll suffocate fish with dissolved gases; send too much through its turbines and you’ll overload the electrical grid.”

Calculating the impact of natural and man-made factors on the Columbia River’s 27 major dams has become its own science, as engineers measure the pulse and elevation of the water in various locations along the river, the amount of fish that migrate through, how much electricity that will be demanded, snow melt from the Rocky Mountains, wind, and more. It has been an evolutionary process for the organizations involved.

It all begins with a daily report from the River Forecast Center to the Army Corps of Engineers which includes both short-term and long-term outlooks. The Corps then takes this information and applies a refined statistical model based in large part on historical data. The results from these models are fed back to the River Forecast Center and an operation plan is defined.

Forbes notes that in yesteryear the Corps relied on more of an oral tradition for decision-making around dam operation. Think lab notebooks or engineering journals. Today, from the Hydrological Engineering Center, it is able to use sophisticated mathematical analysis and calculation software for more accuracy, better analysis, and more collaboration. The software is called HEC-ResSim, a system developed in-house. Engineers are able to apply 70 years worth of stored historical data like rainfall, temperature and water levels to projected scenarios and evaluate the outcomes in ways they have never been able to do before.

All organizations seek accurate forecasting and secure management of IP and knowledge. The right engineering calculation software enables engineers to easily solve, document, share and re-use calculations and design work. It’s used when knowledge capture, data reuse, and design verification are too important for an Excel spreadsheet. The result can be faster time-to-market, higher product quality, easier compliance, and much more.

Do you have complex engineering projects that span across organizations? What calculation framework do you use? How is this analysis documented, exchanged, and stored?

A Day Without Embedded Software

By JILL SHEPHERD | Published: NOVEMBER 9, 2011

“Wow, embedded software, huh?” This is what I recently said, in an attempt to sound smart, when a salesperson showed me a vehicle’s push-button start.

It came out less intelligently than intended, but my sentiment was honest. I’m consistently impressed with how embedded software has changed the face of innovation.

It got me thinking about how embedded software makes my day-to-day life that much easier. I wondered if I could go without these luxuries I’d grown so used to, and decided to give it a try.

One day without using any products containing embedded software. I had no idea how difficult it would be.

I start the day longingly staring at my Keurig. No coffee for me. I immediately regret my experiment. Sure it’ll be interesting, but at what cost? I forge ahead; rummaging in my cabinet for tea. It tastes like watered-down water. I don’t like tea. I like coffee and embedded software.

As I make my way out the door I tearfully place my cell phone on the table. I linger until I realize I’m being creepy, whisper goodbye and leave.

I allow myself use of my car (it’s too far to walk to work) but don’t feel good about it. I feel GREAT about it! Pressing my starter button, I leave the radio off. Most cars have about 100 million lines of code, but the entertainment system is the only thing I can shut off.

Here’s a handy little chart from IEEE that shows where software is used in cars. Basically without it we’d all be Flintstones.

Something else I hadn’t considered is the use of software in traffic lights. To stay true to my objective I don’t stop at any. If I’m pulled over I’m sure any cop would understand the importance of what I’m doing. (I’m kidding.)

After arriving safely at work, I realize I need to swipe my card to get in my office building. I ask someone if I can walk in behind them, showing them my badge and explaining my objective for the day. I get in, but at the detriment of having my colleague think I’m a little “off”.

At work there are times I’m not even sure if I’m breaking the rule. If I get my coffee from a carafe, is that okay? It will have to be, I need coffee. I avoid my office phone, but I do look at the caller ID so I can get back later. Then there’s the printer and scanner. This is harder than I’d thought it would be.

It’s when I get home that I realize this is an impossible mission and I allow myself to give up. The coolest products have embedded software, and the types of products integrating software is growing. There’s even more to come. Take for example this shoe that has a GPS to track Alzheimer’s patients.

Food for thought…

Embedded software and mechatronics are here to stay. And they’ve resulted in an even more complex product development process. Has this trend had an impact on your business?

Read more about how leading companies are looking to take advantage of software-driven innovation to tailor products, increase reuse, make agile updates in the field, and reduce costs.

Volkswagen Adopts New Compact Platform

By KLAUS WIEDEMANN | Published: NOVEMBER 8, 2011

In a recent interview with German automotive trade publicationAutomobil Industrie, Michael Macht, member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG (responsible for production), said he expected cost savings of up to 20 percent and assembly-time reductions of up to 30 percent with the introduction of Volkswagen’s new MQB platform, which will start in 2012.

MQB stands for the German “Modularer Querbaukasten” and can be loosely translated as “Modular Transverse Matrix”. In essence, MQB or Modular Transverse Matrix is a modular product architecture that uses a set of common components to design a wide variety of transverse, front-engined, front-wheel-drive models ranging from Minis to large family cars.

According to Macht, the new MQB platform will not only utilize common components across Volkswagen’s different brands and product lines; it will also standardize manufacturing sequences across product lines and global manufacturing locations: “A main element in this standardized approach is it will not be limited to common components such as floor pans, steering assemblies, axles, electronics, seat frames or air conditioning units,” Macht says.

The introduction of MQB is expected to bring the Volkswagen Group one step closer to its goal of becoming the world’s number-one automotive manufacturer, overtaking Toyota and General Motors.

Although similar approaches to standardization and modularization have been adopted by competitors of Volkswagen, historically the industry has struggled to leverage the potential. Orchestrating modular product architecture across a global enterprise is quite an undertaking, requiring rigorous analysis and logic in defining an architecture that fits different product lines. It takes dedication, clout and determination rolling it out across 62 global manufacturing locations, as is the case with the Volkswagen Group.

Building a vehicle architecture which accommodates Volkswagen’s diverse products—from VW Polo and Skoda Fabia at the smaller end, up to the next VW Passat and Seat Bolero—while also allowing for variations (in the wheelbase, track width and overall height and seating position) is no small feat and speaks to the quality of German engineering.

But it also speaks to the maturity of technology which allows the sharing of information and processes across model ranges, brands, and locations. And here is where competitors and industry peers will find the best leverage to catch up with Volkswagen: Over the last decade product lifecycle management (PLM) technology has matured to a degree that enables runners-up to “build” commonality concepts across product lines with “out-of-the-box” solutions.

One example is StreetScooter, a much publicized German electric car concept that is developed in what its makers call a “disruptive network approach” that brings a network of more than 50 partners together to build a car which breaks through cost barriers and speeds up technological innovation.

Read more about StreetScooter:

• Deutsche Post DHL Fleet Goes Electric
• Chancellor Angela Merkel Visits International Auto Show
• Test Drive for New Electric Car
• Driving Down the Cost of Electric Cars
• New Electric Car Offers a Sustainable Future
• IBM’s Design Philosophy Spawns Next-Generation Electric Car
• Why it’s Time to Invest in the Electric Car

From the outset, StreetScooter has been designed in a way that will support a modular set of variants, from the number of seats to the purpose of the vehicle (delivery vehicles versus convertible sports car). By leveraging a rigorous approach to modularity, Achim Kampker, CEO of StreetScooter, claims that StreetScooter is an economically viable alternative, with no compromise in terms of safety.

Further reading:

• Volkswagen’s MQB Platform: From VW Bulli to Audi A3 Sedan