Engineering Productivity Increase with Organization Architectures 2017-01-0248

Motivation - Ambiguous product targets, a global market, innovation pressure, changing process requirements and limited resources describe the situation for engineering management in the most R&D organizations. Achieving complex objective with limited resources is a question of performance. Performance in engineering departments is highly correlated to the existing capability of the engineering staff. When the reduction of engineering effort in development projects becomes additional goal for the management, an increase of engineering productivity is required. International engineering sites are established globally to push the capacity limits and to increase the productivity by the accessing big employment markets of engineering talents. By solving the conflict of limited resources and complex engineering goals, a need organizational challenge occurs - global co-engineering. Co-engineering is the extension of simultaneous engineering by the distribution of tasks and responsibilities in a global organization. Different to other global enterprise functions, like sales, the individual engineering staff takes over global responsibilities independent of their own localization. Systems are designed, constructed, implemented or tested in one region for the product release in a different region.

Contribution - This technical report analyzes the challenges of engineering management in a global co-engineering environment. The relevance and value of a transparent organization overview is described and derived. The Organization Architecture (OA) is explained as tool to achieve the required transparency of globally distributed roles and responsibilities. The relevance of the organization structure is distinguished from the process structure required for product quality (acc. Six Sigma) or process maturity (acc. SPICE). The method to introduce, maintain and use of the Organization Architecture is described, including the nomenclature for the organizational elements. The benefits of the OA along those phases are evaluated in an industry use-case. The typical organizational optimizations - identified by the OA - are introduced and explained. The limitations of the OA for optimization of engineering organizations are explained. The possible combination of the OA with other management methods for R&D are discussed.