What if you had a design tool that ensures quality designs, no matter who used it?
Imagine that your most important customer would call Gareth and Rhonda, your two best sales reps with a request for a product. These sales people would interpret this need and hand it over as a problem description to two different design engineers. These design engineers, with their own experience, preferences, knowledge and style would then create a separate quotation for that customer. What are the chances those two quotations would be the same? Perhaps a more interesting question is: How important is it for your business that those quotations would be the same?
It may not be a common issue that a customer would get two quotations for the same problem specification at the same time. What is common, however, is that companies produce highly different quotations for very similar problems depending on who creates the quotation. Design engineers are after all humans and, as such, do things their own way. Some are senior engineers who designs ”like they always have done and it has always worked fine”. More junior engineers may lack that experience but use new, modern ways of solving the same problem using other techniques and parts. In practice, this means one design engineer will use one set of parts and another one another set of parts, when they really could have been using exactly the same. This workflow makes it frictionless and allows for more flexibility for the engineers but is much less efficient, and more costly, for the company as a whole. If every engineer has his preference of motor, for example, the company needs to keep an excess of all of those different motors in stock, even if the different solutions just as well could have used the same motor.
The major issue here however, ladies and gentlemen, is the loss of quality. When you do not have repeatability in your design process you will be more vulnerable to the risk of creating occasional low quality products, followed by claims costs. This, since you cannot guarantee the design was made by your best engineer, on his best day, every time. The key to really solving these problems is to have an automated design tool that ensures quality designs – no matter who uses it and when. Your business should be offering the same quotations, design solutions and products no matter who does the design and his or her preference, experience, or knowledge. This will also highly reduce the resources spent on time-consuming design processes that could, and should, be automated.
Design automation tools like Tacton’s Design Automation tool is perfect to address challenging, time-consuming, and costly errors in the design process. The benefits will be real quality assurance, faster quotation and better efficiency in the overall design process. So, next time your customer calls with a request for a product, they will receive the same quotation in the end – no matter if they talk to Gareth or Rhonda.