The Realization of Value through Research

This month, we hear from Dave Lawson, Advanced Manufacturing Scientist with the Walker Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre.

One point that eluded me for several years as I was developing my career in engineering design is the concept of value. I always intuitively knew that my fundamental job was to deliver value, but I lacked a way to express it in tangible, actionable, terms. As I became increasingly established in the automotive industry, my time with the engineers and designers at global leaders such as General Motors, Honda, Opel and others, trained me to think about value in a simple manner. While it’s not strictly a formula, us engineering types like to propose things in that manner. For me, it was expressible as below:

There is a temptation to try to quantify each of these but as we will see, that’s not very easy.

Starting with the supposedly easy part, we consider ‘cost’. In this, I refer to the total lifecycle cost. Most people focus first on the cost of acquisition and that’s fair as it often reflects the largest single element, but not always.

In reality, the subject of cost is far more complex and as you dive deeper it becomes more subjective, straying away from the ‘numerical’ aspect which seemed like such a great idea in the first place. Indeed, as we start to think about the future and the social impact of our products and services, the concept of cost can become downright murky. So much for just being an engineer…

Then quality, how can you possibly create a numerical representation of this? But what is quality, actually? I have come to the conclusion that quality is nothing more than “the degree to which a product meets the expectations of the user”. Easy, eh? Not even slightly.

When I met with my engineering teams, and occasionally with my more collaborative customers, we had open-ended discussions about what quality meant in our context. What were the expectations? Did we limit ourselves to the expressed expectations, or should we think of the “customer’s customer” (in our case, the automobile driver)? Engineers like to delve deeply into specifications, but these expectations were difficult to express in that form. How do you write a specification for ‘feels and sounds nice and in harmony’? Even tangible factors such as colour, surface finish and reflectivity were measurable, but still fundamentally subjective. Anyone who has stood at a wall of paint chips in the local paint store understands this intuitively.

Functionality is often used as a measure of quality. Comparing products across a product line, or with competitor offerings, allows us to consider objectively the relative feature set. While nice and comforting to product managers, it does nothing to speak to the question of whether the customer cares about the number of speeds, or the latest self-adjusting gadget. The client is the one who expresses value in their needs.

So how does this translate into a concern for us here at the Walker Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre?

Great question. In the end, research is all about filling in the blanks. If we already knew the answers, we would not need research, we’d just hire a bunch of designers and engineers and make it happen. In reality, the process of finding the answer is rooted in truly understanding the question. That’s where concepts of quality and cost become tangible and very central to the discussion, in fact. That is where we find the value of research.

Of course, it would be arrogant of me to tell my prospective clients where we will deliver value for them before we even have a chance to dive into a project with them. But I am happy to reflect on the benefits of research, as opposed to the cost of not doing it. With apologies to Gartner, I have the illustration below that proposes the benefit. With the small investment (in blue shading), the delivered value is largely the avoidance of waste in the launch and production phases (green shaded area). The proposition here is simple, that the value is the ratio of the green bits divided by the blue bits. If we do our job well and understand the question really well, the ratio of the two is maximized. In other words, we find the value.

Are you ready to have us help you find the value? Do you have a project idea? Intake is ongoing and we’re here to chat.

Explore the WAMIC website, or contact Tess Finlay , Coordinator, Business Development, at [email protected].