originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering on 25th September 2012
Engineers are, by all accounts, a fairly unsociable lot. That’s of course not to say that we’re particularly obnoxious in any way - it’s simply that engineers have not, over the decades, dispelled the notion that we are difficult colleagues. We’re not great at meeting people, we dislike meetings, can’t spell and can’t express ourselves with any degree of fluency. Yes, we’re generally capable of having families and we do grudgingly recognise the need for working with others but we communicate at best wordlessly, through diagrams and drawings, prototypes and graphs, with equations if we’re showing off. Thrown into the deep end of human interaction - with real live people - we flounder a little, then try to escape into our own little air bubbles, wide, panicked eyes magnified by refraction.
I threw myself into the deep end last week by attending a two-day seminar on FMEAs run by the software company APIS, which makes the rather special IQ-FMEA product family. I survived the experience. And it seems that most of the others that attended did, too. Whilst I can’t completely repudiate the notion that engineers can be a little insular or initially difficult to connect with - well, that’s human nature at work rather than the type of human in the conference.
The seminar was held at Maritim hotel in the lovely town of Würzburg in the Franconia region of Bavaria (there lurks a lot of history behind that statement, meaning that the Franconians don’t appreciate being called Bavarian). The APIS team organised the conference very well indeed, including some opportunities to get to know the town, its history and its culture, in particular its wine.
So, you’re thinking: wine, history, culture, coffee. But how was it even remotely possible to fill two days with lectures and presentations on this one, dry old topic, whose output is typically a spreadsheet used only to pass audits? How can over 200 people gather to discuss the FMEA?
It’s true: most FMEAs are merely vestigial remnants of a potentially great tool. Most companies get away with paying the merest lip-service to them (they have to, in order to pass audits), as they can often rely on long experience in designing and producing their product - or they are sufficiently fleet of foot (and well funded) that mistakes can be made and quickly rectified. Yet the FMEA, like many tools, is there for a purpose and, used properly, can lead to surprising revelations and to a fundamental understanding, including a detailed library of lessons learned on your own product. The FMEA is worth exploring and talking about.
So, how were the two days filled, other than with coffee breaks and lunch? With presentations and - most importantly of all, during those self-same coffee and lunchbreaks - talk.
As a quick background of what was presented, here’s a little taster:
“FMEA-Lite” by a representative of Autoliv, the safety equipment manufacturer, who admittedly made the FMEA-Lite look like a thin filling of a very chunky sandwich: the FMEA portion may have been light, but it was surrounded by fat block diagrams and manually created Excel robustness management matrices that looked far more complex than their potential benefit could ever merit. A pair from Continental (one of whom was an ex-developer from APIS) who shared their experience and advised on the Simultaneous Engineering of FMEAs - disparate groups of people working on different portions of a larger FMEA at one time. There was a critique of the wording within the latest VDA guidelines from a chap from Festo, and an FMEA consultant / trainer introduced his thoughts on how FMEAs can be effectively be implemented in today’s ever more complex mechatronic systems. There was even a light hearted and entertaining introduction to the workings of the brains of FMEA moderators (those people who run the software, run the meetings and therefore need to be attuned to the personal and emotional signals and needs of the participants, no matter how grouchy, quiet or aggressive they may be - i.e., often engineers dropped into a very non-engineering style role). This being a company-run seminar, we also received some insights into the future of the IQ-FMEA software itself from APIS (“we like to stay around 5 years ahead of the competition)
So, how did I get on in the world of conferencing? Not great, to be honest. I came away with a mere two new business cards, though also with a few undocumented discussions with representatives from BASF automotive coatings, Siemens automation and Kärcher (they of the pressure washers and much more). But I didn’t break into any cliques. Reading down the attendees list, I would say that well over half of the representatives were there amongst company groups: Continental, Daimler, Magna, Bosch and so on. I don’t recall meeting a single first-timer like me, either, so cliques were both inevitable and slightly difficult to break into - for an engineer like me: the value of conference networking stems from the second time onwards, when people vaguely recall my face, remember that I was kind of OK to talk to.
I’ll dedicate a future post or two to FMEAs themselves. For now, though, it’s good to have made that first step into the conferencing world…
