My name is Matt and I ride mopeds – I’m not talking about the scooters or step through motorcycles that you see cruising around cities and college these days, I mean mopeds. Small, typically old, motorized 2-wheeled vehicles that have moveable pedals allowing a person to pedal the moped like a bicycle if they a) run out of gas b) need to go ‘stealth’ c) don’t feel like push starting the ‘ped or d) feel like exercising.

This post and hopefully a few more will follow my very own product development process as I restore and customize one of my vintage mopeds – the Kreidler MP 19 pictured in the slideshow above and the image below. This post explains the process I went through after deciding the seat needed some attention.

I  had planned to have the original seat reupholstered, but after removing the cover and the foam I noticed that there was a bit of rust on the metal seat pan as well as some cracks in vital areas.

 After seeing the condition of the old seat pan I decided it was time for the old to become new.  Rather than purchasing a new seat I decided to use what I do day-in and day-out at EAC.  I would design one and the try to build it on my own. I like to think that I’m a pretty good engineer and I have all the Creo software tools, so the designing wasn’t going to be a problem, but this will be my first real metal working project.

Step 1: Design

The first step in my design process was figuring out what I wanted my new seat to be.  Do I want it hinged like the original or have it rigidly attached to the frame?  Do I want to tuck the taillight under the rear fairing?  What gage metal should I use, etc.?  After getting my requirements I continued to think of my metal working capabilities as well as the tools available.  Realizing that I don’t have much firsthand experience in metal fabrication and only basic shop tools, hammers, bench vise, angle grinder, and a welder, I knew I had to keep the parts and the design simple.

After many hours (and beers) contemplating my requirements and fabrication abilities it was time to sit down and design the new seat in Creo Parametric.  Inside of Creo I used the sheetmetal functionality to design my metal parts.  The sheetmetal functionality allowed me to design the parts the way that they would be built.  For example, start with a flat sheet in the shape of the base and add a couple of 90 degree walls.  Then add a couple of rounds and corner cutouts to get the base of the seat.

The other sheetmetal parts were created in a similar fashion as the base.  I Decided to mount the taillight under the rear fairing which meant I needed an assembly model to make sure everything would fit together.  Modeling the seat and assembly up in 3D was a life-saver. It showed me the original angle on the rear fairing was too steep and would interfere with the taillight.  I flattened out the angle and adjusted the location of the taillight to get the correct fit and look.  Below you can see the final design. 

With the design work completed it was time to make sure everything would work in real life so I made a prototype.  To create my prototype I printed the flattened state of the sheetmetal parts and traced them on cardboard.  A little cutting, bending, taping and voila, a prototype.  Building a prototype is something we strongly encourage our customers to make.   It’s should be part of every product development project. It made it so I could ‘place’ my design on the moped.  It allowed me to see that I needed to make the seat just a little longer and a little wider. The original design just didn’t look right on the moped. Also, the slightly larger seat will be much more comfortable while cruising around on the winter-torn roads.  After I updated the design it was time to start cutting and forming metal.

Step 2: Fabrication

With each flat pattern done I created an assembly with a part that was the size of the blank piece of sheetmetal and then I assembled all of the flat patterns to the stock piece to make sure I had enough stock material to cut out all of the parts.  Knowing that I had enough stock material I went and traced out the parts on the actual sheetmetal and started cutting.  I used an angle grinder to cut out my patterns because the material was a little too thick for tin snips.

With the parts cut out I laid the flat patterns back over the cutouts and marked the bend lines so I knew where to start and stop the bends.  That is another perk of using Creo’s sheetmetal functionality.  It shows you the start and stop locations for bends with dashed lines.  See the following picture for the bend lines.

Now that everything was cut out and marked I needed something to hold the metal flange walls in order to bend them on the base.  Thankfully we have a bench vise in the workshop.  The only problem was that the walls on the long side were longer than the jaws on the vise.  To get around this I took a couple of 2X 4s and placed them in the jaws of the vise and the sheetmetal between the 2X4s.  The 2X4s provided two benefits, support along the entire edge of the bend as well as a nice round edge for the sheetmetal to follow.  Thankfully I was able to create the bends with just my hands and body weight.

For the rear fairing and the front edge the radii of the bends were so large that I could not use the same setup used to create the bends on the base.  What I did was I found a steel pipe with roughly a two inch diameter and clamped it in the vise.  I then roughly placed the middle of the bend on the center of the pipe and pressed down creating a bend/crease in the sheetmetal and repeated this several times.  When I had the general shape bent out I took a rubber mallet and used that to smooth out the bend.  One thing to note about the rear fairing and the front edge is that I left extra material on the ends in order to have something to hold on to while bending the parts.

Once all of the sheetmetal parts were cut and formed it was time to start welding them together.  Welding seemed a little daunting since the only other time I welded, about 7 years ago, I set my pants on fire.  Thankfully I had a coworker teach me a little about welding before I started.  I also practiced quite a bit on some spare material before I started. This helped me get the welder settings correct for the material thickness. With the welder dialed in I made tack welds to hold the parts in place while I made sure they were exactly where I wanted them.  Once each piece was in its proper place I started to weld it all together.  After the parts were welded together I ground down smooth any excess weld and then went back and filled in any voids and re-ground as necessary. It was a learning experience. It was kind of like “lather, rinse, repeat” only “weld, grind, repeat.”

Below are pictures of the seat during different times of assembly as well as the finished product on the moped.

Lessons Learned:

Throughout this design process I learned a lot.  For one thing, you can do a lot more with a can-do attitude than you think.  Another thing I learned was that welding is not as daunting as I thought.  As with anything in life it takes a little practice and patience.  Prototypes are amazing.  They may cost some time and or money but they are worth it.  If I did not make a cardboard prototype I would have had a seat that was just a little too short and I would have had to remake the seat from scratch once it was finished.  The sheetmetal functionality in Creo Parametric is fantastic and really does work.  The bend lines on the flat patterns helped immensely to create accurate parts.  One other thing I learned was that on my next project I need to take a lot more pictures along the way.

I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures of the finished product (minus paint and a little bit of leather and foam). Until next time…

Sharing the motives behind this blog through self introduction seems the right place to start.  By self introduction, I don’t mean telling you about myself – you can find all that up on LinkedIn – but rather about EAC and our shared view of product development.  EAC was founded and operates on a fundamental belief that the way we (you) execute product development is fundamentally flawed.  We further believe that this deteriorates America’s competitive position and unnecessarily, unacceptably demotivates the expert knowledge workers who operate within the functions critical to product success. 

As an achievement focused organization, EAC seeks first to understand the drivers and root causes of the positive and negative behaviors typical of product development environments. We then engage in the competition of ideas to produce an array of countermeasures to bring to common product development problems.   One output of this internal collaboration is the Product Development Operating System (PDOS), a framework for the conduct of successful product development published on the EAC website.

An element of the PDOS gets to the heart of justifying this blog.  In the PDOS, we use a maturity model to articulate an important aspect of improvement efforts within product development.  Limited by flawed management habits many companies become trapped at what we call Level 2 operation, “Silo’ed”.  During the maturation of a product development system, the gap from Level 2 to Level 3, “Systematic”, is the most difficult to bridge.  It is EAC’s mission to help product development organizations, to borrow a phrase, cross this chasm.

Siloes are interesting.  In companies they are at first a sign of progress. The generalism of entrepreneurships reforms into specialized functional areas, enabling further growth and maturation.  But they eventually become a barrier to further organizational progress.  That’s not surprising; Peter Senge tells us in the first law of systems thinking that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions”.  For these maturing companies, getting beyond the silo mentality is one important key to progress.

Earlier in my career I spent several years working in Japan at a global manufacturing company.   Japan during the course of its history had periodically shut itself off from the rest of the world.  The Japanese talked about their resulting global naivety – knowing and caring about only what happened within their limited domain – as ‘ii no kaeru’, a ‘frog in a well’.  A well is just an upside down silo.  For functional groups, understanding their own bigger picture – the landscape in which the well or silo exists – is the first step in the work of connecting the silos and fostering systematic operation. 

EAC conducts Voice-of-Customer interviews, performs Product Devleopment System Assessments, and provides consulting services.  During these events, when we visit prospects and customers, it is startling to see how hungry each company’s product development thought leaders are for stimulating and informative ideas and discussions about what can be done to improve product development operation.  And that is how we justify this blog.  To all of you who from time to time feel like a frog, this blog is aimed at letting you know what’s going on outside of your well.

• Engineering Bill of Materials – as designed
• Manufacturing Bill of Materials – as shipped

You may not agree, many don’t see it this clearly. Industry does, and therefore, some software tools have more ability than you may know. But, I guarantee, if you overlay these two elements onto what you are doing for BOMs, whether in Engineering, or in Manufacturing or Production, you’ll see the clarity of these two simple elements rise to the surface.

Definition:

EBOMs are created in engineering, are typically driven from the CAD tool and are usually centric to the final assemblies list of parts or components that make up the as designed or EBOM. 

MBOMs will contain, or be ‘driven’ by the EBOM. MBOMs make up the ‘end item’, or product as shipped. Of course, the EBOM, or ‘parts list’…the MBOM requires additional things like shipping containers, crates, peanuts, or packing foam, plastic bags for accessories, power cords, or items necessary to complete the product that are not defined on the EBOM.

Evolution of this ability & pain points:

In the drawing board days, we often communicated this detail as a table on the final assembly drawing. Sometimes as many sheets attached or referred to on the final assembly drawing…Hopefully, you’ve evolved beyond that! If not, that’s okay, there is hope. Unfortunately, many still use this legacy approach, and are still creating (painfully) this table on their CAD assembly drawings. Others may be manually forming them in spread sheet software (Anthony, can I say MS Excel or any product names in blogs?).

The next step, and pain point, you must re-enter or get the data into your ERP/MRP tool. Either manually, or via an importation, it is error prone. What if changes occur? (But, that never happens, right?  )

How much time does your organization spend on these tasks? How about on errors because of changes? Do you have the role of Configuration Manger defined?

This task, creating the MBOM from the EBOM usually has many manual and painful disjointed steps. Often involving exporting out of one tool, into another, but only if you are evolved enough – as I stated earlier, many are not this evolved, but have a vision to do so…maybe you’ve already made a connection from your data management tool, to your ERP/MRP system? 

Here’s my shameless plug for EAC and Windchill - EAC can help you form this vision, and guide you to a better way of understanding this topic in context of your organization. We strongly believe there is a better way to develop products and managing EBOMs and MBOMs is just one part of doing it better. Windchill can drive the EBOM into the MBOM or vice versa. It has out of the box ability to be the tool for your Configuration Manager roles in your organizations. Options and variants are another use case you’ll see in a future blog topic.

Lately, I have had many customers that have taken my Introduction to Creo Elements Pro 5.0 course with extensive prior knowledge of a different CAD system.  These experts of the other CAD system usually always appear a little reluctant to learn something new.  I can totally understand!  These customers are being asked to take a week off from being productive at work as well as their productivity will be down while trying to produce work within a new CAD system.  In addition to this their old habits, comfort, etc. will be put the test and will most likely have to be either lost or recreated.  All of this equals stress!

As I teach these customers I like to take away that stress. The less stressful I can make the training environment the better it is for learning.  I too made a similar switch a dozen years ago when I learned Pro/ENGINEER being a prior AutoCAD user.  This switch from a 2D CAD system to a 3D CAD system can be the most difficult scenario I run into.  I like to let the customer know this fact to ease any of their frustrations they are having during class, as well as reassure them that they are doing really well in the learning process.  I also like to let the customer know of similar or different terminologies and concepts.  However, they soon learn that this 3D element opens a whole new world of capabilities and precision.

Another common customer I run into during these Introduction classes are ones switching from a smaller company to a larger company.  Sometimes smaller or startup companies go with a less powerful CAD choice like Inventor, Solid Edge, or Solid Works.  When customers leave those positions in search of new opportunities they tend to find themselves having to now learn a version of Pro.  This switch is not as difficult if the learner is actually willing to except the change.  Meaning, I sometimes find an individual in my class that will not be 100% to the change even though they openly admit that Pro is a much more powerful CAD system and they even understand that many of the other parametric 3D CAD systems are based off if it.  This customer will still wish they can continue to use their old CAD system.

Both situations go back to the customer’s habits and comfort.  To ease the transition I tell them that the only cure I know of is to make switch with an open mind and build more models.  The more models they build, the more time on the system, and the more they will understand it.  I can even see this during the one week I spend with them.  Thursday and Friday are always easier for all learners during the Intro class than Monday was.  I must run and prepare for some Windchill training next week…Take care!

We now like to refer to what we do as Extensioneering rather than consulting or outsourcing as these terms tend to have a  stigma attached to them.  In reality, what do you think of when you hear outsourcing;

• Why would I let someone else do my work?
• I don’t want to tell someone how to do it or explain what I need, when I can do it myself.
• They won’t get it right.
• Outsource…doesn’t that mean send it off to China or overseas?
• Toss it over the wall and see what comes back. 

Some of the comments or statements may be true in certain situations.  Some of these ideas stem from poor experiences in the past.  And the worst may just be due to job security.  Most of the bad rap that outsourcing or consulting gets is due to poorly set expectations.  You should never have to lower the expectations of what you will be getting from your outsource partner, but do discuss expectations with them from the onset before any work is actually performed.  Doing this early will insure you get a project completed and the deliverables will meet your needs.

I can’t tell you that outsourcing or extensioneering is the right solution for your company or project and I would like to tell you to send all your overflow, R&D type of projects to us (this is what we do) but that’s not the point of this  post.

So here are some simple things to think about when choosing a design outsource (Extensioneering) partner;

1. What is the communication schedule that you will be having on the project?
2. How responsive were they when you approached them on the project?
3. In discussion of the project, were they truly interested in the project?  Will they provide some amount of potential education back to you (if needed) or vice versa?
4. How many resources can be applied, both from your company and the potential design partner?
5. What have they worked on before?  It’s not always a bad thing if they haven’t done “what you do”.  This allows for some out of the box thinking and fresh approaches.
6. What software is to be used?  Not just the CAD, but the data and project management aspect as well.
7. What is the expected timeline for the project?  Remember that the design partner schedule may also be dependent on what you can provide them in regards to communication and reviews.

Before continuing let me clarify I am in no way writing this from a personal or current experience standpoint. My bosses are actually quite good folks as bosses and as people. But there are employees out there in the daily grind that aren’t as lucky as you or I when it comes to their superiors.

But whose fault is it?

America has definitely been in better times economically and from a job-hunter’s perspective. That being the case everyone – let me restate that, EVERYONE is trying to do more with less; In many cases MUCH less. That includes your boss.

Training

In an article by Peter Couture in the St. Petersburg Times (Wednesday, August 17, 2011) titled “Bad Bosses Often Lack Training, Resources, Trust” Florida State University’s Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration states that “we take people and we put them in these situations and we give them the employee handbook, and they learn how many vacation days Tony can have, and they need to know what happens when Sally gets pregnant, but the whole notion of humanity … we don’t teach managers that”.

Resources

Imagine you are a carpenter… You’ve been given the task of nailing together two 2x4s. You are told by your boss “nail these boards together; here’s a box of nails”. He then spins on his heels and is off to the next “emergency”.

The task is simple enough and you fully understand what is required and how to best achieve the needed results. But then you realize “Hey! I need a hammer…” so you poke around but can’t find a hammer. You ask your boss and he says, “It wasn’t budgeted for and we’re not hitting our numbers. Make do with what you’ve got”. So you proceed to find a rock and start banging away at the nails. Bending many of them, getting some to go into the board if you’re lucky.

Ultimately you’ve wasted more resources (nails) and gotten your task done (barely) in 10 times the amount of time it would take if you simply had the right tool for the job.

The boss doesn’t always have the best tools. Often, bosses haven’t been trained how to manage people or those they do supervise aren’t great employees, either.

Trust

Because of our tenuous economic times everyone is on high alert when it comes to the slightest shifts that may affect the bottom line. Therefore the reigns tighten across the organization for everything that moves. This propagates a feeling of not being trusted to make the right decisions to best set a team, department or division up for success. Feelings of distrust from superiors are a huge demotivating factor for a leader.

Keep these things in mind when you’re about to begin “boss bashing” during happy hour - Chances are your boss hasn’t received the right opportunity, guidance or training. Or maybe they don’t have the tools they need to be efficient and fully set you up for success. They could also be feeling powerless due to high levels of anxiety form others in these uncertain times.

Why?

Why should you care if your folks are happy? Happy people are more productive, more innovative, more engaged. If they are engaged then they are team members – not employees. If you have productive, innovative and engaged people working with and for you what do you think your odds of success are? Whatever they may be, they are going to be much better odds than if your folks are “working in the gray” of the punch-a-clock, check-the-box environment.

So how do you create an environment that fosters these mythical, happy, productive, innovative and highly engaged team members? Jacquelyn Smith of Forbes posted “Companies that Make Their Employees Happier”, Tuesday, September 6, 2011. Smith cites the jobs site CareerBliss.com’s annual Leap Awards, which recognized companies that have made the most significant strides to improving employee happiness year-over-year.

The web site’s awards are based on surveys of over 250,000 companies, so it isn’t just the “big boys” that are doing things to boost their employees.

Some of the most significant changes or implementations that the recognized companies have done all have similarities. The first and most common aspect of all of the awarded organizations was ensuring work-life balance for their people. This is common not only for this year’s winners but is consistent year-over-year.

Managers with flexibility in allowing their teams and their approach to getting things done are a key component in achieving balance and greater happiness. The flexibility also shows greater trust, which fosters innovation and willingness to proffer new ideas or ways of exceling as an organization.

Here are some other things you and your organization need to take a close look at and do some honest, soul-searching evaluations of how well you achieve these. Your findings may point directly to the current state of your people and their satisfaction and level of engagement with you and the company.

• Do your people have the right resources to be successful? Training? Software? Hardware?
• Are your people compensated fairly? What is your answer based on – comparative fact or your gut feeling?
• Are there growth opportunities for your people, or are you of the opinion that they should “make their own opportunities”?
• Do your folks have autonomy to do their job to the best of their ability or are they hampered by inefficiencies in systems, process or others individuals?
• Are you allowing your team members to fully exploit what interests them?

Ask your team the same questions. You may be surprised at their answers! Hopefully for the good!