Conceptual design – what in the Mentor Capital dialect we refer to as a ‘high level design abstraction’ is usually associated with a practice known as architecture development and uses ready reference plans known as block diagrams. Block diagrams are how engineers have in recent past been trained to capture theoretical models of electrical and electronic plans for later product engineering realization.
The benefits of this way of understanding are that you can visualize, summarize functional interactions. A visual reference which is simple, which avoids layering detail onto the page (or computer screen) aims to give engineering team members enough information to be able to design.
Slathering on too much detail can make it hard to assemble a complete and accurate set of data to support the design. When developing an architecture for signal, network and electrical distribution for a complex transportation platform (e.g. passenger car or private jet) there’s really no choice but to make assumptions because devices and components are not yet chosen or implemented/integrated into the overall system. And where complex sub-systems are known, electronic modules, controls and sensor/actuator patterns it is typically viewed as wise to model these as “black box” items – taking heed of the input requirements and the output feeds. Exposing all information is seen as risking overwhelming the human processing, architectural design people look at the forest, not the trees.
In general block diagrams helps design engineers’ transition to schematic diagrams as ways of depicting and modeling their design intent. I say “in general” because the use of the terms “block diagrams” and “schematics” is generally understood and crisply delineated. Most customers we have refer to systems schematics – wiring diagrams are almost universally referred to as schematics, and harness drawings sometimes get called schematics.
Engineers want sufficient information – not too much.
The systems architects – they are knowledge rich and time poor. Capturing the 1000 things they “just know” and automating it in a digital modeling environment is an attractive proposition. Most people with “architect” in their job description have a short window of opportunity in the development life cycle of the electric car or the satellite or whatever transportation platform. And then the next project comes along immediately. It is rare to have time to learn some new sub-process, be trained on a new tool and then evaluate it and prove it out. And time is a scarce resource too in the sense of the age profile of these talented individuals. People in this position tend to be rich in experience and perhaps looking forward to the ends of their working careers.
Succession planning has to be in the minds of their managers and the executives of these companies, for an ageing specialized workforce comes will well-known business risks. Organizations need to plan and nurture those who may step into these exposed positions on the leading edge of product development and to explore what adjustments to process and tools the next wave expects to be able to have at their disposal.
Speaking as a person at the tail end of the so-called baby boomer generation, and watching a few of my contemporaries already leaving the workforce I’m personally becoming more aware of this age profile issue for customers. It is made worse of course by the general shortage of experienced engineering talent. It is a good time to be an electrical platform design or wiring harness engineer because there is an acute need to attract new talent to the field.
Oldies
Here’s a reference Baby Boomers in the USA and elsewhere may get. There’s plenty of work and the bosses are paying. “Not a sad word should a young heart be saying” – wise words from Smokey Robinson, Miracle worker. Just think about the Temptations offered by prospective employers – and how they wouldn’t have been so mournful had Capital been around in 1965 in the Motor City.
Good career planning means you should never get to be indispensable because then it is difficult to move out of the team, or move up in role. Good succession planning means there’s always an understudy ready to step into the role.
Technologies behind the drawings engineers use – data underlying the models.
Fortunately in Capital there is much that can help customers achieve business goals of managing risk, and maximizing the efficient use of their human resource. If you use Capital Systems and Capital Integrator, you have a great opportunity for:
- Retaining the tribal knowledge as a tangible assets (rather than intangibly held in an expert’s brain)
- Validations of design scenarios (what-if & trade-off studies) making conceptual design more iterative and cyclical
- Flexibility in your employees’ workflow achieved through functionally rich off-the-shelf software systems which can model the processes as well as accurately representing the components & physical variations of the electrical interconnect
- Re-using design data back and forth along the workflow.
Curating in one environment more of your product development from first broad-brush designs all the way down to volume manufacturing and aftermarket is possible/achievable – production will not have to stop for months during a re-tool. Getting there is beneficial – will eliminate manual hand-offs of data sets, with attendant risks of quality failures from transcriptions and translations.
Views with different levels of information – an architectural-topology view & a logical platform level view.
Promoting standardization and unification of methods – also with a payoff to quality improvement consistency is something Capital customers have found opens you up to evaluate designs early in the life cycle, and then continue to operate a feedback loop to architectural designers from a long way downstream. That’s sometimes referred to as a digital thread.
Which takes me round to the block diagram usage again. In order to have trace-ability, transparency for the architectural work right down through to design for manufacturing revisions and embellishments, and then back on up – these block diagrams should be part of the workflow. The outputs generated by the architects should be used by the later engineering teams, and the outcomes of the designs moved towards production should be related back to the original intent. “Should” now with Capital becomes “can” be associated in a productive way. Not a drawing system – Capital is a model based systems engineering tool suite where referencing design data upstream or downstream compares the models, not simply the graphical representations.
Systems Block Diagram from which an electrical systems schematic can be generated.
A start in realizing this benefit is to have the block diagrams linked in the design life cycle tools, sharing the same database, the same application code-base all the way through to manufacturing if you wish it. Happy New Year, that’s what Capital does.
