FEBRUARY 2001

Engineering Trends:
Feeling the Squeeze? 
Stay Focused on Results

by Todd Yuzuriha

The overall business environment for technology companies has slowed recently. You’ve seen some of the signs — the Nasdaq market deceased more than 30 percent in 2000, and 14 out of the 17 dot-coms that advertised during last year’s Super Bowl did not advertise during this year’s game. Lucent Technologies is reducing its headcount by about 10,000 workers. Resumes submitted to Monster.com hit a record 38,000 per day in January.

As businesses slow down, engineers feel the squeeze. How so? It seems now more than ever that engineers are under more pressure to work faster and smarter.

To continually put yourself in the best possible position, you need to stay results-oriented. One of the best approaches is to keep improving productivity for your organization. Simply speaking, I define productivity as the ratio of outputs to inputs:

Productivity = Outputs / Inputs

As an engineer, focus on the factors you have control over to increase outputs and decrease inputs.

Ways to Increase Output

Engineers have direct impact on increasing output by developing new products, increasing manufacturing capacity, and completing research for use in future products. New products stimulate growth and can lead to higher gross margin dollars than current products. Efforts to improve new product time to market can impact your company significantly.

Increasing manufacturing capacity pertains to making improvements so that your production facility makes more product with the same resources. Examples include improving the manufacturing process yield by identifying and eliminating root cause yield loss factors and identifying methods or equipment to achieve greater output with very short payback periods.

For those of you in research, make sure your project has a well-defined plan for implementation into future products or services that will benefit  your organization significantly. Utilize efficiently designed experiments in your planning so you can reach sound decisions in the least amount of time.

Ways to Decrease Inputs

Decrease inputs by improving efficiency. For manufacturing, understand the financial cost model of making your product. Identify the biggest cost factors and work to decrease those costs.

For development, be sure to use company and personnel experiences so that you can continually learn from previous successes and failures. Such implementation helps to develop new products efficiently.

Communication is Key

Measure the benefits of your work and report the results. It doesn’t do much good if no one knows about your accomplishments. Develop a simple, consistently formatted report that quantifies how you’ve reduced time to market, increased gross profit margins for particular products, or increased manufacturing capacity.

By staying results-oriented, you put yourself and your organization in the best possible position as the business environment slows down.

 Todd Yuzuriha is the author of How to Succeed as an Engineer: A Practical Guide to Enhance Your Career. For more information, go to www.engineeringsuccess.com