Question

Discuss in details the key performance indicators (K P I s) of engineering design control.

Discuss in details the key performance indicators (K P I s) of engineering design control.

Answer 1

In the industry key performance indicators are used, in order to lead whole enterprises or individual departments. The balanced scorecard (BSC) as example of a KPI reporting gives an overview of the activities and projects, finances, number of employees, level of customer satisfaction etc. to the management. Therefore it is a very important instrument of control. The base for this instrument are KPIs from the enterprise, processes and products. Most departments and their manager do not have problems to supply KPIs, which demonstrate the efficiency and economy of the department. However there are enough measurable data during the processes to set-up KPIs. Examples for used KPIs and the departments are sales volumes from sales, processing times from production and manufacturing, level of customer satisfaction data from marketing.

Only the engineering department has difficulties to specify KPIs. Because data like project costs, dates of milestones, number of new products, number of variants, number of change requests etc. do not permit directly a conclusion on the efficiency of the engineering department. Therefore it is for many enterprises a challenge to fit a KPI reporting for the engineering department. Publications and literature do not help, as literature searches resulted in to the topic. Each enterprise and its engineering department must find KPI fitting for itself.

There are some methods for a systematic setup of KPIs for development processes based on the data of product data management (PDM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The target of these methods is to create universal proceedings with which it becomes possible to identify useful KPIs for design and engineering processes. With these KPIs it will be possible to lead the employees and to demonstrate the economic efficiency of the design and engineering departments