Predictive metrics for concurrent engineering

It is well known that “God is entitled to opinion, and all others must bring facts and data.” To get agreement on the specific needs for a company, the best approach is to back up recommendations with facts. Are the new products that arrive in your manufacturing operation up to snuff? Would a series of analytical tools and metrics that are being used in industry to improve and speed new product development processes be useful? Tools such as the “Staffing Ratios” metric and “Project Staffing Speed” metric are applied to make sure that the right amount of human resources and skills are in the right places at the right times. Does your company hit the planned market release dates for new products? Tools such as “Time-To-Market Prediction” may be applied to assess past project performance and to predict the schedule outcome of current projects-in-process. Does your company achieve early cross-functional involvement on projects? The “Concurrency” metric may be used to define cross-functional requirements and quantify the degree of parallelism. Most of these tools can be learned within a few minutes and brought back to your company for immediate application