Engineering Management, Systems Engineering & Analysis - Essay Example

ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT Introduction Progress and development are important goals and aspirations of a company. These critical elements, which determine a company's success and market strength, are key aspects during the course of formulation of all kinds of tactics and strategies. Before making any strategies or a general plan, one has to take a lot of factors and situations into consideration before moving ahead with any kind of implementation. Typically, one could consider the introduction of a new product, which is a key activity of most of the companies. Before moving ahead with any such thing, the company would have to consider a number of key issues, which are listed below: Time. Investment Labor. Raw materials. Equipment. Product promotion. Projected performance. The above are just some of the key aspects that are proposed to be discussed under the current paper. Therefore, it can be said that the company or the management of the company in particular would have to take all these aspects into consideration and ascertain whether all the constraints associated with these factors are suitable or not. The product can only be introduced if and only if a majority of these factors are found or are projected to be favorable to the interests of the company. Therefore, a company needs to two things in this regard. The first and the foremost requirement is to conduct a fair assessment of the various constraints and make a forecast. Secondly, the company also needs to come up with an action plan in order to be able to handle any situation such as things not going along as expected or detecting some errors in the forecast etc (Blanchard & Fabrycky, 2004). therefore, all these factors need to be considered before the introduction of the product into the market. Therefore, this is the key consideration that the current paper would attempt to discuss in depth in line with the concepts of System engineering. The paper would accurately determine the resources that would be required for each phase of the project in addition to determining the implications if any of the calculations went wrong. Systems engineering & Analysis The introduction of a new product into the market may be regarded as a project. Generally, such a development would usually comprise the following stages (Blanchard, 2001): Analyze the current products in the market. Drive internal R&D (Research & Development). Design new Product. Ensure that the new product's attributes are competitive enough to survive the market pressures and be able to offer healthy competition to existing and established products. Be able to make the necessary adjustments in all possible respects in order to achieve the above-mentioned objective. These phases are not sequential in order and may vary in their sequence of occurrence. In many cases, these steps have been found to be iterative in nature. The focus of the company that intends to develop and market a new product would be to use the resources to the least possible extent and to be able to use them in an efficient manner. This can be achieved through the concept of system analysis. Under this, the entire development is considered to be a complex system. Thus, system analysis would concentrate on studying every part of the system as well as the relationships between these parts in detail. It must be mentioned that it does not matter whether the system under consideration is an abstract system or a physical system, the former being the one in the present case. Most operations that are conducted under systems analysis are based on the use of certain mathematical models for generating the appropriate results. These mathematical equations are used for describing the behavior of the system's individual components as well as the effects caused as a result of the interaction of these individual components. The estimation of the various resources along with their quantities can be classified into two main categories, which are discussed in detail: Operations Research. PERT & CPM. Operations Research The estimation of the resources under operations is usually aimed at finding out the best among the available alternatives, which calls for the use of optimization techniques (Grady, J.O., 1993). Therefore, under optimization, there are a number of available techniques that will be discussed here: Linear Programming: This is used for solving the problems associated with resource allocation under business management. The Linear programming solution can be applied in places where the objectives can be expressed in a mathematical form and the resources can be measured effectively. In the case of the new products, the company can use the graphical method to calculate the optimum use of the resources b comparing the times taken for the original product and the time taken for producing the new product. For example, if X1 and X2 are the original and the new product, the profits are a1 & a2 respectively, then the total profit 'Z' can be calculated as: Z=a1X1+a2X2. The times taken at each of the individual phases can additionally be used to formulate a few more equations, which can be used to solve in order to determine the amount of resources required at each of the phases so as to be able to maximize the profits at each stage thereby making the maximum possible profit. Transportation Problem: the techniques used under this section are aimed at minimizing the material handling costs. Two methods namely, Vogel's approximation and the North-West corner method are used for this purpose. Under the former method, a matrix is constructed that lists the sources and destinations (the various locations at which the new product is proposed to be produced and the dealers to whom it is to be sent) along the rows & columns against which the transportation costs are entered. The differences in the costs at every row and column are then used to determine the square(s) that contain the maximum quantity with the lowest cost. The north-west method is a similar one to the Vogel method except that the initial allocation of resources is started from the north-west corner of the matrix. This method is used to determine the factory capacity and the dealer's requirements. Waiting Line: This method is used to determine the adequate provision of processing facilities in order to minimize the waiting time for finished or processed goods at every stage of the manufacturing process. The queuing theory analyzes the possibility of adding manpower or equipment to the existing facilities in an effort to assess the amount of waiting time and the cost associated with it at every stage. The calculations under this method are made using the Poisson distribution (for waiting line models) and the exponential theory (for calculating the service times). This method is additionally used to calculate the gaps between the arrival times of products, the priorities associated with the different goods so that the company may be able to segregate the machinery between existing products and allocate the other for the manufacture of the new product. All these variables are then used as variables under statistical methods to determine the probabilities associated with the production of the new product, which determined the amount of resources that need to be allocated in order to produce it. Dynamic programming: it so happens that the new product that the factors that determine the success of a product may vary with time. For example, the product may initially receive a lukewarm response in the beginning but may then receive a tremendous response due to a variety of factors. As such, there is an enhanced demand, which needs to be catered to by the company. Such an occurrence requires that the resources that are required for the product are not constant with respect to time and keep changing. The concept of dynamic programming, which takes this aspect into account this phenomenon, is used by specifying the state variables, decision variables and the stages of the process. Under the present case, the state variables could be the inventory, processing times etc. while the decision variables could be the manpower and the number of machines required. The objectives are then used to adopt a multistage solving approach for the purpose of making the correct decisions. PERT & CPM The PERT (Practical Evaluation & Report Technique) is used to determine the necessary schedule for the production of the product. In many cases, it is used to reduce the amount of time required to produce the product. Therefore, it is used to strike a balance between the time & resources. Under the PERT technique, the company is supposed to determine three different types of duration required for manufacturing the product namely the optimistic (to), most probable (tm) and the pessimistic (tp) durations (Baumol, W.J & Blinder, A.S., 1988). The use of the following equations at every stage of the manufacturing is then used to calculate the effective time for manufacturing the required product: Te= (to+4tm+tp)/6. The calculation of these times is then used to determine the overall probability of being able to deliver the product within schedule. The determination of this quantity helps in estimating the necessary resources that need to be allocated to manufacture the new product in order to be able to deliver the product well-ahead of schedule. The Critical Path Method (CPM) is used to plan and control the most logical and economic sequences of operations required for manufacturing a product. This is done by the construction of a network diagram, which is then used to evaluate the critical path that contains all the activities that require the maximum durations. This method is especially useful in the production of new items as it uses data from past experience as the basis for evaluation. This is done by breaking down the manufacturing process into a set of activities, which can then be used to specify the duration of each activity (leading to the calculation of the critical path through the calculation of the earliest starting time and the latest finish times for every activity). The crashing of the various activities along the critical path helps in determining the optimal cost and the network is updated accordingly to yield the final network diagram. Implications if the calculations went wrong One of the first mistakes that are generally committed by the management is that it fails to forecast the estimated demand for the new product over a period of time. Thus, the management avoids the possibility that the demand may be dynamic in nature, which is usually the case. Under such a scenario, the team is unable to allocate new resources in the even of any changes in the demands as all the calculations would have been made using static variables, which leads to loss of business for the company, at least until it takes the necessary corrective measures. Another mistake that is usually made is that the company actually allocates additional resources on paper, but at the time of implementation, it finds that it either does not have the resources in such quantities or it doesn't have the expertise to handle such demand owing to the immediate availability of resources. Therefore, cross-checking of the availability of the resource is very important so as to avoid unnecessary and costly delays in the future. Under the PERT technique, it so happens that the management team goes wrong in estimating the various times associated with any stage. This could lead to a wrong calculation of the overall total time, which ultimately leads to the project falling behind schedule. Thus, efficient forecast of the durations is of utmost importance in this technique. Thus, it can be seen that these techniques are very useful if and only if there is a proper estimation and forecast in the beginning. REFERENCES 1. Blanchard (2001), Systems engineering Management, third edition, Singapore: Wiley eastern. 2. Blanchard & Fabrycky (2004), Systems Engineering and Analysis, 3rd Ed. New York: McGraw Hill. 3. Baumol, W.J & Blinder, A.S. (1988), Economics Principle and policy Microeconomics, 4th ed., San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 4. Grady, J.O. (1993), System Requirement analysis. Boston: McGraw Hill. Read More