Our abrupt and ongoing shift to remote work is having wide-ranging effects on design, engineering, and manufacturing industries, putting great pressure on organizations to be more agile, efficient, and flexible in a COVID-19 world.
With teams that are more distributed than ever before, how do we approach our work? To put it simply, how can companies test their designs when they can’t get into the building?
To gain insight into the opportunities and obstacles these questions present, The Curve asked MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor A. John Hart and MIT System Architecture Group Director Bruce Cameron to weigh in on the future of remote work for design and manufacturing-oriented industries.
Taking an Expanded View of Remote Work
“Many organizations are now asking, how do we be more agile? How do we adapt? How is adaptation on the fly a key principle for engineering and manufacturing going forward?”
-- MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor A. John Hart
Virtual prototyping, virtual verification, and cloud-based CAD software are some of the tools that enable remote work for design and manufacturing and engineering professionals. But, Hart says, this shift is also about “collaborating digitally, being a distributed team, and even beginning to implement distributed, digitally-connected supply chains in the proverbial factory of the future.
“In the digitally-centric product development process, we can design a part and simulate its performance, and then it can be produced with minimal human intervention. Additive manufacturing—or 3D printing—is key to realizing this vision, and to realizing new products that offer improved performance with shorter development time, fewer components, and simpler supply chains.”
An agile supply chain can enable firms to move quickly in response to changes. “Those changes can be a public health emergency, or it can be in response to a product failure in the field where a repair needs to get there quickly."
“Many organizations are now asking, how do we be more agile? How do we adapt? How is adaptation on the fly a key principle for engineering and manufacturing going forward?”
Applying Systems Thinking to the Remote Design Process
“We are concentrating on this question of how Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) works when everyone is remote,” says Cameron. “Can the model identify problems in a way that avoids the need to host long design reviews?"
- MIT System Architecture Group Director Bruce Cameron
Working online is pushing us to think about what changes we can make to the design process.
“We are concentrating on this question of how Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) works when everyone is remote,” says Cameron. “Can the model identify problems in a way that avoids the need to host long design reviews?"
“We’re finding people are less likely to speak up about an issue when everyone is on a Zoom. This is critical in design – little issues unsurfaced have a way of turning in recalls.”
Being Goal-Oriented Not Constraint-Limited
Additive Manufacturing and MBSE are opening new design opportunities for distributed teams. Says Hart, “One thing additive manufacturing and systems engineering are doing well is using systems thinking to be goal-oriented rather than constraint-limited."
“When we think about the interplay between design and manufacturing, design is a very open-ended exercise by nature. You think of all the possibilities and then land at the one that's the best. Manufacturing brings constraints to the design process. Engineers must think about what it takes to scale the design and bring it to market.”
“With additive manufacturing, you have a new design space: geometries that could not be made before, materials that couldn't be processed before, and even complex shapes that you couldn't have dreamed up before.”
As we emerge out of the crisis, Cameron explains, organizations will catch their breath from tactics, and start to re-examine their strategies on where to play and how to win. “For a lot of firms, the crisis is causing them to examine where to play in digital delivery or online commerce – think everyone from restaurants to car dealers. How to win is more interesting,” says Cameron, “and it links back to systems engineering. For example, would selling directly to customers instead of through dealers provide us with new insight, in such a way that we could consider underwriting the investment of direct sales machinery with future new product ideas from users directly?”
Learning New Approaches
For many organizations and professionals, the potential uncertainty brought on by the pandemic has necessitated strategic upskilling through online learning.
Hart says, “Additive manufacturing (AM) requires organizational adoption in order to be most effective. By developing a shared knowledge of the technology’s capabilities, organizations can build AM as a core capability. Different roles need different knowledge. As an engineer, you may need to know the deep technical details of metal 3D printing and how to effectively design parts for AM. Or, if you're an executive, you may want to understand the economic and operations possibilities in order to build an effective organizational strategy.”
Given the breadth and significance of AM, MIT’s additive manufacturing course is adaptable to the needs and interests of any role — from engineers to designers, from managers to executives. Thousands of past participants have these roles in the aerospace, automotive, consumer products, medical, materials, and other industries.
Likewise, MIT’s online MBSE course takes a deep dive into the topic and delivers specific, actionable skills. Cameron explains: “With the MBSE course, people are there to learn about model-based systems engineering specifically, as compared to our in-person programs that cover a broader headings, such as managing large technical teams.” This laser-focused approach may help organizations accelerate their online systems engineering workforce training.
In combination with these technologies and approaches, an organization can adopt new ways of working to meet the pressing demands of the global pandemic and accelerate its digital transformation.