How do you ensure your stakeholders know you meet engineering design standards?

The initial step involves identifying the applicable standards for any engineering design project. This process entails considering a range of criteria based on the project's scope, complexity, and domain. These standards may include industry-specific, national, regional, international, or organizational norms. You can utilize online databases, catalogs, or directories to pinpoint the most relevant and up-to-date standards for your project. Seeking advice from experts, colleagues, or industry associations can also provide valuable insights and recommendations for selecting the appropriate criteria.

One thing I found is Local regulations which mandate the standard to be used for manufacturing. e.g. MoM Singapore regulations mandate ASME and EN standard. other standard requires approval from MoM Authority.

Clear Documentation: Provide accessible design standard documents. Regular Reporting: Share design reviews, test results, and compliance updates. Transparency in Reviews: Involve stakeholders in design reviews, and address concerns. Quality Assurance: Use robust validation and testing aligned with standards. Certifications: Obtain recognized certifications and display them. Collaboration: Engage stakeholders for feedback and insights. Training: Educate stakeholders about design standards. Metrics: Share progress on design standard-related KPIs. Continuous Improvement: Address deviations and communicate actions taken. Consistency in these actions will reassure stakeholders about adhering to engineering design standards.

Design standards are varying for every different application and are set by frequent users which need to be understood first before any design assignments. These are very important to understand very well that will help to procure OR manufacture your products. This also helps in time-saving and engineering man-hours.

An engineering standard might be useful to find general guidelines; however, it is better to meticulously review the application instead of blindly following the requirements in the design standards. I have always done that in my projects and it is proven effective.

One helpful idea for incorporating standards into your design process is to create a visual matrix that maps each relevant standard to specific design criteria, objectives, and constraints. This matrix serves as a quick reference guide, ensuring that each aspect of your design aligns with the appropriate standards. As you progress through the design stages, you can easily track and verify compliance by referring to this matrix, streamlining the integration of standards and enhancing your final product's overall quality and reliability.

Incorporate identified standard to the requirement in the early stage of the project to establish expectation, ensure technical assurance and reduce scope change.

Incorporating standards early on in the design process is like embedding a quality assurance mechanism from the get-go. From problem definition to validation, they should be your guiding star. Tools like checklists and matrices can serve as handy roadmaps, bridging the gap between standards and your design's objectives. Leveraging software tools, whether it's CAD, CAM, or CAE, can ease this integration significantly. These platforms inherently align your designs with the chosen standards, ensuring accuracy. It's all about ensuring your design not only meets but thrives within the established criteria. The harmony between your innovation and the standards ensures a robust, compliant, and efficient design outcome.

The article fails to elaborate on the importance of considering interconnections and dataflow compatibility when selecting CAD, CAM, and CAE tools. In today's world, inefficient processes and data handling present significant challenges, impacting project efficiency. This issue underscores the need to address wasteful practices to enhance overall project effectiveness.

Actually, Use tools like reports, diagrams, or charts to detail how your design aligns with standards. Employ audits, reviews, or inspections to ensure adherence to procedures and quality controls. Utilize certificates, labels, or logos to indicate compliance with accreditation or certification. This systematic approach provides your design endeavors transparency, quality, and credibility.

The article should highlight AI compliance tools for verification—an emerging, widely adopted approach, reducing human errors. Modern digital tools provide real-time reports, graphs, and notifications, streamlining communication.

Engineering design standards are established norms or requirements that define uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices. They are important for promoting safety, reliability, productivity and efficiency in engineering projects. To ensure that stakeholders know we meet engineering design standards, we need to specify our requirements clearly and document how our design meets them. We also need to follow the relevant codes and standards for our field and location. We may also need to present our design to our stakeholders and demonstrate its performance through testing or simulation.

Also, it's important to remark how profitable our design is from a business perspective. In the end that's the benefit the stakeholders are looking forward to.

Creating stages of design helps introduce standards to relevant stakeholders in collaborative way. For examples running 15%, 40% and 80% design reviews introduces the opportunity to inform and consult with stakeholders on standards exercised. Another critical tool is creating a safety in design document which explores safety aspects of a design at different project life cycle phase. It ensures safety and standards have been applied at the different stages of a project including design, construction, operation, demolition and maintaince. This ensures stakeholders are engaged and able to understand and contribute effectively at different stages of design to esure safe and successful execution.

In my experience, I had worked on many NPD projects and mostly pertaining to conversion from metal to polymer composites, where we had to create new set of standards for product qualification criteria because the material behaviour of polymers is non linear unlike metals. So we will start with the Testing and validation standards for the product and then evolve it such that the final product in polymer composite meets the end functionality of the product. Having said that I must say that it will be very useful for the NPD design engineering process of there is a software or a tool to map the product dvlp and design life cycle.

Sometimes it may not be clear what standards or codes are applicable for a project. For example, ASME B31.3 Process Piping Code is widely used by many industrial plants, but it does not address fiberglass reinforced plastic materials. If a process calls for these materials to be used, extraneous quality assurance and compliance methods need to be employed to ensure stakeholder satisfaction. Some examples would be witness testing, third-party inspections and calculations, and benchmarking against other projects with similar applications.

In certain projects, compliance to a myriad of local and international standards are expected. When these local and international standards provide deferring compliance requirements, the design engineer can have a difficult time in ensuring compliance. Consider doing the following, 1. Check if the local standard is mandatory. If so, adhere to the local standard by default. 2. Clearly communicate to the client on the deferring compliances and lay out the pros and cons. This is additional work so try to be project specific on the impacts and layout considering terms of time, cost and labour considerations. 3. Seek advice from the local regulators

I have not only been involved in design of LPG cylinders but also in developing and revalidating standards. Sometimes it's discovered that international standards are deficient to meet local conditions due to a variety of factors ranging from product handling to climatic conditions. In that case, a local standard is developed to override international standard.