Often, Smith said, design engineers work in a vacuum. They're simply told to design a part. They focus on this one task and often lose sight of the big picture. Dane Barrager, president of a company that provides quality control software, said engineers are often asked to design parts that can't be easily created. Frequently, engineers focus on whether they can design such a part.
Thoughts go out the window about whether the part, once designed, can be easily manufactured.
There are cases I've heard of where the operators who make the parts are supposed to have three hands to get the job done. The software from Barrager's company, Integral Solutions of Royal Oak, Mich., is intended to map the manufacturing process, or the process flow. The software gives machine operators a diagram of the process that they can refer to and follow on computers that are located throughout the shop. The software, in essence, digitizes the paper trail. The design engineer's role in the manufacturing pro-cess is to identify, in an abstract way, how the part he or she designs can be processed, Barrager said.