Engineering Life-Machine Design

Steve Williamson once said that there are analysts and then there are synthesysts. The analysts are the ones who model and simulate physical systems and the synthesysts are the ones who take all the various engineering knowledge needed and design things.

Machine design is an applied engineering skill, it is a synthesis of many skills. Machine designers are different than machine theorists. There are people who comfortably occupy both spaces; but by and large, the analysts reside in academia while the synthesysts, the designers, reside in industry. There are a number of good reasons for that.

The people who are analysts think and teach in terms of equations, physics, and mathematics. The people who are synthesists think in those terms as well, except they think about them in different ways. The best practice for the university setting does not align itself with the best practice necessary for design, the pedagogy that we adopt for the universities is that the knowledge is presented in a very logical linear progression, based upon what we know about the subject. We start at the basics and we slowly move into the more complex subjects as the student develops more ability and knowledge. 

The problem with machine design specifically is that not only is it multidisciplinary, but the design problem involves many coupled systems happening at the same time. Mechanical system design, thermal design, drive design, manufacturing system constraints, cost constraints, performance constraints, and the interaction between them all affect each part of the design, so there is a never-ending iteration loops amongst all of them. This is not to say that motor design  is unique in that aspect; this is why many complex applied engineering problem solving skills are not taught in the universities: the linear pedagogy does not lend itself to the kind of procedures that we need to apply in engineering. Machine design is the fellow who is keeping all the plates spinning at the same time, you need to have and eye on everything. Of course, that is assuming that the designer has the overall picture of what they're trying to do. Therefore, it is called the synthesis part of engineering: you are synthesizing all the divergent and diverse knowledge.

To answer the question of why the universities don’t have people teaching machine design, the best teachers are in industry, practicing their art. In order to effectively teach machine design, the teachers, are themselves well versed with the problem and are well versed in the holistic vision of the design problem. The normal academic pedagogy is not well aligned with the synthesis of the many knowledges inherent in the design problem. The usual academic pedagogy is much more aligned with the analysis portion of the puzzle, that is the crux of why we cannot just throw anyone to the wolves and have them have them teach a holistic mind frame of design with sequential reasoning and procedures. There was a time when people used the linear pedagogy to teach machine design, go to some older references in machines from the 1940’s and 1950’s and you will find design sheets, where the designer has to fill in the sheets sequentially. This is to keep the designers from forgetting all the variables they need to calculate for their design. The design equations are mostly algebraic and assumes linearity. The procedure deals with the nonlinearity by assuming linear performance, in addition, these are in the days before variable frequencies, so the designs are assumed to be operating at one operating point. Fortunately, computational power has increased exponentially, and we are able to calculate the design variables through numerical simulation, which gives us the ability to make design decisions quicker and with greater precision. In so doing, however, it allows us to incorporate more of the constraints from the other coupled systems into consideration at a much earlier point in the design process than we have been able to before the computational power, which means that the up front design is much more completely able to meet the designs and constraints.

Teaching machine design is not just teaching the science of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other academic subjects. It is also the passing on of experiential knowledge, there aren’t that many people around who can do justice to the task.

Engineering Life-The Cancer of the Cost-Cutting Culture

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/what-will-it-be-boeing-great-airplanes-that-generate-cash-flow-or-great-cash-flow-period/

I am by no means a Boeing insider. I also cannot vouch for the veracity of Stan Sorscher’s conclusions regarding the Boeing culture just from his July 5, 2019 Opinion article in the Seattle Times. I do, however, recognize the plot-line of the story that he is relating as I had lived in a parallel universe while working in the manufacturing world. His story sounds remarkably like the story that I had been a witness to for most of my engineering career, even though the product he was a part of:  manufacturing passenger airplanes, is much more complex than the product I had a part in manufacturing: electric motors. His product is also purely a performance driven product, whereas the vast majority of the product I dealt with had evolved into a commodity product. A very important distinction, but not one that would disqualify the analogy.

Mr. Sorscher wrote the  letter in response to the culture shift at Boeing that eventually led to the raft of non-performance driven decisions which may have caused two of the Boeing 737 Max airplanes to crash, killing 346 people; this  culture shift also seemingly encouraged engineers to cover up the problem rather than work to solve the problems, especially from engineering managers; it also caused the engineers to ignore the most basic tenet of engineering: getting it right because of cost and schedule pressures. Cost and schedules have always been a part of the engineering practice, they are a key part of the challenge of engineering design and they are natural constraint that good engineers learn to adapt to and overcome in their practices. This is what makes what engineers play in the engineering sandbox rather than play in a pure science experiment sandbox: engineers design performance driven products, not one-of prototype.

Economics is an important constraint in engineering, but economics has always played a secondary role to getting the design right and getting the performance right. The driving force for all engineering endeavors has always about making the right decisions for performance and safety. Even though engineers do not take the Hippocratic oath as the medical professionals do, the vast majority of the engineers that I know pride ourselves in doing no harm.

In the letter, Mr. Sorscher spoke of Boeing being an engineering company first and foremost during his time at the company, a company that is driven by delivering performance. He spoke of how Boeing’s devotion to this engineering centered culture enabled Boeing to become what they had become, a trusted brand that delivered on the promise of performance while rising in importance in the world economy and competing with the likes of Apple and Exxon for investors. He spoke about the company culture turning to employee engagement, process improvement, and productivity in the late 90’s; which followed the management trends of the day, taking the quality centered approach of the Total Quality movement that came from Juran, Deming, and Shewart. An American approach that ironically took a trip to Japan before American management would deign to adopt it and even then, only as a Japanese innovation.  Fortunately for them, that new emphasis on quality and customer satisfaction was perfectly aligned with the engineering culture that was already in place.

I entered the manufacturing world at the end of the performance driven culture in the American electric motor industry. Even though the industry I entered was not as complex, there was a pride in the design and manufacture of our electric motors. The cost pressures were never-ending, particularly from certain market segments that are extremely cost sensitive: consumer products, white goods, commercial products to name a few; but the driving philosophy has always been to deliver on the promised performance. My corner of the world also went through the quality revolution, although we did not embrace the siren’s song as completely because the stakes were not as high in the electric motor industry since our failures do not necessarily involve deciding the lives of hundreds of customers. The costs associated with implementing quality measures and practices were a larger fraction of the overall product manufacturing cost in the electric motor industry and were constantly weighed against the product price. In addition, there is always the incessant desire within the business to increase the replacement business, i.e. why make the existing product better when we want the customer to buy replacement products?

Unfortunately, electric motors were also tagged as a “mature” technology, an ignominious and ignoble designation. It implied to management, marketing, and various other non-technical functions within the corporation that there was no need to spend time and money to do research or development, that the technology has reached the ends of the knowledge evolution. Little did it occur to these decision makers that the technical world is ever changing; the physics may be the same but the constraints on the design, the performance requirements, and the material sciences all change. It boggled the mind to think that this same comment was made of the airplane as Mr. Sorscher implied. Technology maturity as designated for financial incentives is not a scientific verdict, it is an excuse to economize and cut cost. A technology is labeled “mature” when management is looking to spend their money elsewhere and invest in things other than technology. This decision of course, was coming from non-technical or barely technical decision makers who rely on rote beliefs that does not tke into account technology evolution and assumes that there is indeed a finite lifetime to scientific development.

Mr. Sorscher’s description of what came later in the evolution of the Boeing culture is where I felt the greatest pangs of poignancy. Cost cutting and shareholder value became the focus, performance and quality took a very far back seat. When Mr. Sorscher asked the question: “Are airplanes commodity-like or performance-driven?”, I was shocked. It never occurred to me to think of an airplane as a commodity. I certainly would not put my life in the hands of aircraft engineers who believe that they are designing commodities. And yet, that is what happened.

In my own work experience, some electric motors, most electric motors that I worked with, have evolved into commodities, or at least in the eyes of the corporate executive. Emphasis on engineering and manufacturing went away and platforms which emphasized commonality of components that imposed compromise performances became the norm. Product characteristics that were defined by application and industry uniqueness were sacrificed in service to the simpler manufacturing, bookkeeping, and warehousing. As Mr. Sorscher recounts, the cost-cutting culture consists of super-stakeholders doing what super-stakeholders do:

These companies are super-stakeholders with market power over their supply chains. The point of this business model is that the super-stakeholder extracts gains from the subordinate stakeholders for the short-term benefit of investors.

Subordinate stakeholders are made to feel precarious and at-risk. Each supplier should see other suppliers as rivals. Similarly, each work location should know it competes on cost with rival work locations. Each state or local government should compete for incentives against rival states. 

In this model, subordinate stakeholders never say “no” to the super-stakeholder — not workers, not suppliers, not state legislatures.

This is exactly what happened in the electric motor world, contrary to point 4 of W. Edward Deming’s fourteen points, which was: End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.

Indeed, the imposition of the cost-cutting culture degrades the performance and quality driven culture which created the Boeing company up to that point. In my experience, this same cost-cutting culture had diminished many of the electric motor companies to the point that the true value of the company is but a shadow of its former self. Granted, the electric motor is much closer to being a commodity than an airplane, but the deleterious effects of the cost-cutting culture shows no preference, it is a cancer that affects all industries the same way. As Mr. Sorscher stated:

This cost-cutting culture is the opposite of a culture built on productivity, innovation, safety, or quality. A high-performance work culture requires trust, coordination, strong problem-solving, open flow of information and commitment to the overall success of the program. In a high-performance culture, stakeholders may sacrifice for the good of the program, understanding that their interests are served in the long run.

The cost cutting culture obviated technical knowhow in deference to short term profits, it sacrificed fundamental engineering practices rooted in the sciences at the altar of the sub-optimal solutions that are just good enough and are based on guesswork, linear extrapolation, and fictional beliefs.

In the case of the electric motor world, the cost-cutting culture caused the companies that were once dominant in the business to fade and atrophy. Their share of the business eroding and losing market shares to cheapest producer nations. The truth is you cannot cost cut enough to compete with the lowest cost producer, you need to innovate enough to cause your trajectory to bypass and short circuit their trajectory. Those companies that could not only contain cost but also innovate, think progressively, and pioneer new markets seem to do better; while those that could only cut cost have de-evolved to the point of irrelevance in the global market.  The advent of new technologies in power electronics, material sciences, and advanced computing are meeting the needs of new applications and markets. In this case, the challenges of the applications are taking the electric motor technology out of the “mature” technology dustbin and putting them right back into the performance driven world.

I hope Boeing heeds Mr. Sorscher’s criticism and acknowledge their mistakes. I hope that there are enough technologists and engineers left in the significant ranks of Boeing to enable the cultural shift for the better. The cancer is deep, however, and the problem is complex. Every misstep costly, and every bad decision is life threatening. The cost-cutting culture proved to be fatal to many electric motor companies I certainly hope that it isn’t fatal for Boeing.