Chapter 4 - Engineering Perspectives
Chapter 4 - Engineering Perspectives
Section 4.3 - How different countries design products
The general public believes great inventions are the result
of an individuals genius, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This
concept seems embedded in most high-school science text-books.
However, the longer I am in engineering, it seems great inventions are
nothing more than an ability to satisfy a desire of society in an
economical and timely manner. Neccessity is the mother of invention!
For example, think of the internet, cup holders, and nuclear power.
They are not the product of one person independently conceiving these
ideas. They came about because society had a desire for them and
engineering was able to satisfy the desire economically and timely.
The key point is that it is society's desires that fund 99% of the
world's great inventions. Of course 1% of the time, it can work work
the other way around , such as the discovery of pennicillin by
serendipity.
The top four industrial countries have unique philosophy's on good
engineering design. If you plan to build a new product you can learn a lot
by applying the best of each countries design philosophy's while avoiding
their shortcomings. The four countries are Japan, Germany, England and
USA. I will discuss the pros and cons of each countries approach to
manufacturing .
Japan
Japan is known for reliability and consistency. They focus on mass
producing simple designs with utmost care to accuracy in each step of the
many processes. Nothing epitomizes Japanese
design like a Toyota. The cars are fairly unimpressive with regards to
performance, however, they excel in quality and reliability. When you buy
a Toyota you can be assured it will last many hundreds of thousands of
miles with regular inexpensive maintenance.
Japanese also focus on mass
producing their designs. The larger the population of their vehicles, the
more feedback they can incorporate from the field into making future
products robust. The major drawback to Japanese designs is their lack of
performance and high end features. Generally those customers who are very
knowledgeable and experienced with a product have complex needs. Japanese
designs do not cater to their needs well as it would require sacrificing
their commitment to quality and reliability. For this market , the Germans
come in as described below.
Germany
Germans are known for their focus on precision
and complexity. They love to make a design with complex features that
cater to the needs of the most demanding customers. While Japanese go
after the 80/20 rule, Germans follow the 99/1 rule. In other words Germans
believe in satisfying the demanding needs of the niche 1% of their
customers. This philosophy is great if you are such a demanding
customer and know you need complexity. However, most customers do not need
the complexity for their day to day needs.
As a result, German engineering suffers from unreliable and
expensive to maintain designs. Since they are riddled with so many
features, the probability of the whole design failing due to one of its
features failing is very high.
Furthermore, these complex features require
someone experienced and possessing advanced technical knowledge to repair.
So if one of these features breaks, it will be quite expensive to fix. The
operating costs of a BMW are more than triple the costs of a similar sized
Toyota car.
USA
The Americans have quite an unusual approach to engineering. The adage, 'When
in doubt make it stout' summarizes it best. The Americans are blessed with
abundant capital. So they have no problem throwing as much iron,
technical know-how, and resources in order to come up with a working
design. The common
muscle cars, i.e Chevy Camaro and Ford Mustang best reflect
this.
In fact American engineers often have so much resources at their
disposal that they like to make bold new designs. These bold
designs are significantly
different than their current production designs. The result of this is
products tend to be over designed and unreliable since they have no field
history. The pros are the customer gets to try radically new products that
may benefit them in ways they could never imagine.
The same mind-set also means American designs can fail to meet market
needs. In other words many products are failures . However, this is not a
show stopper since there is plenty of money available to cut the losses
and start over again. Very few countries have this luxury of being able to
bounce back from a devastating failure.
England
The English have probably one of the most sensible approaches to
engineering . They believe in just making incremental changes to existing
, time-tested designs based on customer feedback. Since they do not have
abundant resources like the Americans, they are forced to take a
conservative approach similar to the Japanese. The result is a very
reliable and effective product . The negatives are the designs tend to be
out dated and lacking in complex functionality.
As you can see, the four manufacturing giants have a lot to teach us about
how to design good products. While there is a lot of generalization, the
overall philosophy hold true in the design culture of each of the
countries. The same principles carry over to whatever type of product you
are designing. You can even apply the principles to software engineering .
