Has the engineering process changed? 5

[Blackcountryman]

The 45 years since I started my apprenticeship as an electrical engineer have seen continuious change. Most of the products I worked with then are museum pieces, even the tools have changed from a drawing board & slide rule to CAD and CAE tools.

My question is has the basic process changed, I suggest that should the likes of Brindley, Telford, Stephenson or Brunnel come back they would recognise the same process.

A need is identified, engineering look at and even with new processes are asked to give cost and time estimates. The money men, with no real knowledge say it should cost half the price be a quarter the size and only need 10% of the time.

Engineering sit down with a blank sheet of paper and start from scratch. I admit that I talk about reusing previous designs but I still do a lot of rework.

At the end the project is always percieved as late, over budget and only meets 80% of the requirement.

There are good examples about, the current T5 project at Heathrow I believe is one, some automotive projects etc but why are they so few?

How should we operate?

Discuss, or tell me I'm an old cynic

 

[Blackcountryman]

Macmet - I don't think there is anything wrong with the process changing. In fact I'm supprised at how little I think it has changed.
We seem to embrace new technologies but do not like to change 'how' we do things.
I have recently been involved in trying to reduce project engineering costs, associated with the control of automated handling systems, I have been looking at reducing the time by automatic transfer of data from the mechanical drawing to the schematic & then from the Schematic to the PLC program.
Other collegues have been working on automatic PLC code generation from the mechanical drawings.
We can show this will automate about 70% of the project.
The End users and OEMs involved are interested in idea but it seems that all the engineers prefer to manualy do this work.
This was what prompted my question in the first place.

John

 

[Yashu]

Still the same problems.

They'll NEVER change... as opposed to the latin definition of 'engineer'.

 

[Yashu]

Oops... forgot... the problems are called "beancounters".

 

[LCruiser]

There is a differentiation in public works between money spent on engineering and money spent on construction. This is due to increased artificial seperation between the two, giving the beancounters a more solid footing. In the "olden" days, the engineer designed and oversaw the construction onsite. Nowadays, we have electricity, lights, etc. which gives a different type of person an advantage. Unfortunately, that "different type of person" is less aware of the physical processes involved in construction, and in fact there must be handrails etc. for them as they frequently fall into holes and get in the way of trucks, etc. They are not aware. They are also prone to just drawing pretty pictures on paper (sometimes referred to as "cartoons"), rather than constructible designs.

 

[ziggi]

"beancounter"...is that cockney rhyming slang for "idiot" or was it "bureucrat"?

PS. I may have misspelt "bureucrat", bloody French cognates.

 

[arunmrao]

ziggi I only understand cognac and not cognates.

beans counter is the accounts/finance person. and not the bureaucrat/politician.

 

[zdas04]

Beancounter as in "one who counts other people's beans"

David

 

[DrillerNic]

I guess these days, in civil engineering projects, the role of the engineer seems to have been overtaken by the role of the architect- so for example the Syndey Opera House is credited to Jorn Ulzon, although I think structural engineer Ove Arup had to redisign most of it. And recently the Millau bridge in France has been referred to as "Norman Fosters bridge", where I'd wager that beyond a couple of sketchs and some arty sounding poo about "a ribbon of steel floating in the mist" most of the work was done by an engineering firm.

 

[LCruiser]

The difference between engineers and architects is this, according to one of my favorite profs. If an architect was the only one to build structures, they would all fall down. If an engineer was the only one to build structures, everyone would tear them all down.

These days there is an increasing emphasis on form over function, which means two things. One, the architects will get more credit. Two, cost effectiveness goes out the window and things like ... an increasing national debt result.

 

[davefitz]

Lcriser,

In that case, who designed the new Charles de Gaul airport at Paris - the one that collapsed 1 month after it opened.

 

[ziggi]

arun, zdas,
Only an engineer would reply with a literal reply to my comment And most definately only an engineer would break it down into it's parts to analyse it

As for the artsy crap beign tacked onto buildings, I like it, I'm not a fan of eyesores. But I dislike the artsy comments "ribbon of steel in the mist" my tush.

My attitude pisses my wife off to no end, she's a theatre teacher and always sees the symbolism in everything, colors, expressions etc etc, I see the parts that make it up. Sometimes I do it just to rile her up hehehe.

 

[SomptingGuy]

And recently the Millau bridge in France has been referred to as "Norman Fosters bridge", where I'd wager that beyond a couple of sketchs and some arty sounding poo about "a ribbon of steel floating in the mist" most of the work was done by an engineering firm.

Well put!

 

[LCruiser]

davefitz writes:
"who designed the new Charles de Gaul airport at Paris - the one that collapsed 1 month after it opened."

I give up. Who?

 

[JRMacGregor]

Not sure about other industries in other places, but one area where the engineering process has changed is the design and building in the US/UK of large naval ships.

That seems to be going backwards at a tremendous rate, probably due to the loss of experience in the management, design and production personnel. Not helped by the general growth in bureaucracy and ass-covering.

Or by the lack of competition – having only one major customer who has no where else to go is probably not very good for the soul and certainly not good for the process of cost control.

At least until the 1960s, US naval shipbuilding projects were capable of delivering remarkable achievements. In July 1950, one month after the start of the Korean War, the US Secretary of Defense finally offered the USN a new aircraft carrier. This vessel was to be a first of class design, much larger than any preceding carrier. One year later, the shipyard contract was placed, and the keel was laid within another year. The 75,000 tonne Forrestal was delivered less than 4½ years after contract, despite the design being changed to accommodate an angled flight deck after the keel had been laid !

In the project for the first nuclear carrier Enterprise, the onboard reactors achieved Initial Critical status in December 1960, just 5½ years after approval was given for the development of a land based Large Ship Reactor prototype. The detailed design and construction of the vessel was accomplished within 4 years of the contract date.

Similar striking achievements were made in the nuclear submarine field.

However, by the late 1960s and 1970s, several large naval programmes in the USA were experiencing significant delay and disruption, which resulted in large claims against the government. It seems that the extended delivery periods experienced with these programmes became the new benchmark for the future.

Now, a Nimitz type carrier takes 8 to 10 years to build, despite the benefits gained from all that experience and the fact that the basic ship is a very old design.

White collar (YES – not build hours) for the latest VIRGINA class submarine are reported to be in the range 18 to 30 MILLION manhours.

The reported design hours for the NAUTILUS (first nuclear sub in the world) were 1.5 million and 2.0 million for the GEORGE WASHINGTON (first Polaris ballistic missile sub). These designers had to solve problems never encountered before.

Modern government design/project people are probably more occupied with proving to their political masters that what is being designed and procured is the “right” thing to be doing than actually doing a design/management job. Whether or not the effort in the latter direction has achieved the desired results is an equally valid question.

 

[ScottyUK]

LCruiser,

Googling [blue]paris cdg airport architect[/blue]

gives a lot of hits relating to the collapse of the structure. The architect was Paul Andreu.


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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...

 

[LCruiser]

Hmmm. According to:

http://www.airport-technology.com/projects/degaulle/

"There were fatal flaws in the construction which should have been picked up earlier."

 

[Jabberwocky]

If by process you mean:

problem + engineer + money + time = solution

then no it has not changed, but if you meant the system of doing business then I'd wager it has.

For one thing, my title is (Biomechanical) Design Engineer. We don't have an Engineer and a Drafter and a Designer and a Secretary, we have me. Computers and their lovely little buttons allow bypassing three of the above professions entirely.

The Internet lets me shop around for multiple suppliers and compare quotes within days (if not hours) of conceiving of the product in the first place.

I can e-mail fully detailed 3D models of the part I want made for the machine shop to look at, and that's assuming I didn't generate a physical rapid prototype to go along too.

I can't vouch for the way things happened 45 years ago (I didn't exist yet) but I'm pretty sure some things ahve definitely changed.

 

[Blackcountryman]

Jabberwocky,

I agree with you, what I think has dropped out of a lot of organisations, includeing the one I work for is the habit of recoding everthing you do. I was told as a young engineer that f I phoned a client or contractor and said Good morning I should at least confirm it with a telex. Ok the contract file was big but when it came to who said or did what we had the evidence.
I have always & still do keep a jounal with notes and calculations in also decisions not recorded else where. Again when push comes to show I have evidence in the form of notes made at the time. This can be of use when the Health & Safety people get involved if things got wrong.

 

[Jabberwocky]

I'm with ya, Blackcountryman. I actually keep a legal pad with me at all times to keep track of what I am doing, what I should be doing, and what I did. I actually started out with a .txt but it wasn't flexible enough. This pad has saved my butt quite a few times already. How else could I possibly know what I was doing three months ago?


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