Yesterday I talked about this critical aspect of all engineering:
Design decisions you make right now, that impact manufacturability or procurement of parts or ease of maintenance, will have a ripple effect on the project as a whole.
I discussed one of the major places I see this principle show up, where those design decisions impact how much it costs to make or source a component of your product. Today I’ll finish out the other two places.
In my world of small UAVs, budgets are already very tight. Being smart with design decisions can be the difference between a program managing to continue and prove itself deserving of follow-on funding, or running out of cash and being shut down entirely.
Buying exquisite parts is fun, but if it means you can’t actually make it to a first flight of your prototype then you’ve essentially failed. Fancy hardware does not a Program of Record make. At a certain point, you have to accept your limitations and prove out your concept to make it to the next funding round.
This emphasis on smart financial choices filters down to your end user, too: do you want to use components that are fancier than necessary, that cost an arm and a leg to get replacements of and inflate the cost for your customer even more?
Or would you rather give your customer a relatively easy-to-source part that’s reasonably priced and typically in stock, which means they actually like your product, keep using it, and keep giving you repeat business? (Bonus points if it can be easily integrated into the airplane, per “someone’s gotta make it”)
If you’re making, say, luxury yachts and don’t have to worry about any of this, I genuinely envy you. Also, how did you get that job?
But the rest of us should consider adding to our hat rack a new addition: that of a “financial engineer”, as this LinkedIn commenter coined it.
The point isn’t to pinch pennies. It’s to, yet again, see the entirety of your product’s design-manufacture-use lifespan. To see the whole ecosystem that will be built up around it over time.
And to maybe make design choices that positively impact the other 90% of the total cost—or at the absolute least, consider those choices.