Every hour the engineering team is not working on product designs wastes precious time and extends the wait for new improvements and innovations.
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Written by: Darren Garnick, Content Director, Onshape
As any Bible reader or college philosophy major will confirm, humans have free will—and that can be a huge problem in terms of productivity in our work and personal lives.
Here’s a quick-and-dirty chart of how much time we waste each year on various activities:
Time You Will Never Get Back
- 8.1 days/year – Posting and Scrolling on Instagram (Becoming Instafamous)
- 5.5 days/year – Couples Deciding What to Eat (NY Post)
- 4 days/year – Women Deciding What to Wear (Daily Mail)
- 3 days/year – Men Deciding What to Wear (Daily Mail)
- 2.5 days/year – Searching for Misplaced Items (Pixie Technology)
- 2.25 days/year – Being Stuck in Commuter Traffic (CNN)
There are inherent flaws in all data, which is a topic for another blog, but it’s worth noting that both the clothing decision study and the commuting study referenced above were done prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Presumably, with most desk workers still being remote right now, the decision for which shoes to wear with a specific outfit is currently moot, and commuting time in most places still hasn’t returned to its full agonizing peak.
Also, human behavior varies widely from individual to individual. In your spare time, or perhaps during work Zoom meetings with your camera off, you may prefer recording dance videos for Tik Tok, while your colleague might like to post their takeout meals on Instagram.
The real questions when considering statistics like these are, “Which of these time-wasting activities are behaviors I can change?” and “Which ones are beyond my control?”
Reducing Wasted Time in Product Development
Companies live or die based on their intellectual property, and that IP is created by designers and engineers. Enormous sums are invested to generate the next big idea. Every hour the engineering team is not working on product designs wastes precious time and extends the wait for new improvements and innovations.
Wasted time also creates opportunities for competitors to catch up to your company or beat you to the market—provided that they are not wasting time, too.
So which activities are “stealing” the most design time? In The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2021 report, an independent industry survey conducted by Isurus, we asked nearly 800 manufacturing executives, project managers and engineers that very question.
Here’s what is getting in the way of productivity:
These survey results are absolutely stunning. More than 4 out of 5 product development professionals report having trouble finding the correct product design or accessing it.
Working on the wrong version of a design can lead to costly manufacturing errors, frustrating rework, wasted materials and possible liability issues. But it is also stolen time that could have been devoted to the next project. Not being able to locate the design in the first place is equally frustrating and unproductive.
The fact that the data management problems beat out unproductive meetings—everyone’s favorite punching bag—is a notable feat. The engineering field, which places a high value on accuracy and precision, is still struggling with version control and making it easy for multiple contributors in a project to get to the right data.
Rounding out the list of top time-wasters are CAD crashes and data loss (nothing is more aggravating than watching your work instantly vanish), and software and hardware maintenance.
Although long meetings will likely never go away, they could be reduced if employees could always get to the data they need and could communicate about it effectively peer to peer. This transition has already occurred in the software development industry and in the customer relationship management (CRM) space.
This list of time-wasters should motivate design and manufacturing companies to ask themselves, “How can we give our product design team more time for design?”
As with the time-wasters in our personal lives (lost keys, traffic, mindless internet surfing), the answer lies in which factors you can control and which ones you can’t.
So, as with phone apps that limit social media usage, solutions to time-wasting snags in the product design process are being developed—it is just a matter of discovering which is right for your team.
Interested in learning more about potential areas of improvement for your product development team? Download The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2021 and discover the best opportunities for improving business agility.
