Productivity improvement

[mb77]

I'm an engineer that has been developing productivity tools for engineering for quite a long time now.

I've noticed that engineers tend to be dealing with more and more data. Whether it is surveying and performing analysis across an impossibly large number of load cases or tedious data entry for CAD designers.

Yes I know there are some brilliant CAD, CAE and CAM systems out there that reduce the workload, but it still seems to me that engineers are having to manage greater and greater volumes of data.

So my questions are:

Is this a trend across the industry, if so, is it unique to aircraft engineering?

Where do people feel the major bottle-necks are and what are their drivers?

Thanks.

 

[rb1957]

i'd agree we have to deal with much more data today, in part because we're smarter, in part 'cause we're dumber.

'cause we're smarter we consider many more things (load cases, crazy situations, F/DT, ...) than before. we're also using newe materials (composites) that raise new and different questions that need answers.

'cause we're dumber (and 'cause computing power has increased significantly) we run many more cases than we really need to. we'll run all the load combinations, instead of applying ome smarts and throwing up cases whihc we think are non-critical.

is this a big deal ? not too much in my experience. max/min envelopes cover alot of ground quickly. consitent cases where needed can be a little of a pain. s/sheet and mathcad tools (if carefully set up) allow cases to be re-calc'd wihtout starting from ground zero.

 

[wes616]

I would also add that each individual engineer performs a greater volume of tasks as compared to even a few years ago. Yes all these tools you mentioned mean each of us can get more done faster. In lieu of increasing the overall volume of work tasked to a group of engineers, management instead has chosen to task the same (old) volume of work to fewer and fewer individual engineers. So naturally we have to manage more data in the same time frame as we used to manage less data.

Wes C.
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