Engineering in a recession

How will you design products and finish projects?

Do you have manufacturing partners in China?  Or have a distributed product design team?  Or are you running a project that’s under construction somewhere other than your office?  Are the rising costs of fuel cutting your travel budget?  Is the recession forcing your company to cut IT costs?  All of these questions lead to the next one, which is “How are you going to stay on top of the team efforts necessary to bring your products/projects to successful conclusion?”

 

One thing you know for sure is that a lot of the projects that you get will be intended to engineer for lower costs.  Lower costs of tooling and lower costs of production are sure to factor into your company’s plans.  However, all of these projects create more work, and there won’t be more resources available to get it done. 

 

Over the past several years the technology powering engineering collaboration has improved dramatically.  Complex tools from the major software providers such as Autodesk, Siemens, PTC and Dassault have enhanced the work-flow and documentation of many large companies.  However, if you don’t work for a company as large as Boeing or Toyota, chances are you don’t have the latest tools available.  With the recession officially here, there is now no chance that you are going to get a big IT budget to go buy the latest and greatest from the big vendors.

 

Many creative engineers in this situation are relying increasingly on low or no cost internet tools, including web conferencing, file sharing, ftp, email, etc.  If you have heard of some good free tools, please post a comment below or send them to me at jhayes@engineering.com.

 

FYI – we are looking hard at providing a number of these tools on ENGINEERING.com at no cost to our members. 

 

John