Read Marty Hauff's lastest blog for New Electronics:
Excerpt:
That was the last thing my wife said to me as she kissed me goodbye and I settled into the cab bound for the airport. I was departing for a week long business trip to the US and her parting request was for a blue dress. "Sure," I thought. "How hard can that be?"
A day or so after landing, I managed to get my bearings enough to venture out to a local mall in San Jose. We don't have Macy's or Nordstrom's in Australia but we do have stores like them so I felt reasonably confident that any mall that had one of those department stores would most likely have what I was looking for. The hotel concierge suggested Valley Fair and so that's where the cab took me.
When I arrived, it just so happened that blue was one of the current season's colours; I should have expected as much if that was the colour my wife requested. But to my horror, trying to work out which blue dress to buy out of the huge selection quickly became quite overwhelming. The image I had conjured of returning home to joyous accolades from my wife was quickly overwhelmed by the paralysing fear of the consequences of buying the wrong thing. Not wrong because it wasn't blue; but wrong because it showed too much of this, or not enough of that, or didn't sit right, or didn't have enough space in the right places, or was too long, or too short, or was simply plain ugly! Finding a blue dress was the easy bit. But finding the right blue dress felt like a task that was destined to end in tears.
One of the challenges faced by electronics design and manufacturing organisations is how they manage the tenuous link between engineering, parts procurement, and manufacturing. Creating an electronics product requires the careful management of a myriad of constraints; only some of which are technical. If an engineer designs a product that is technically viable but commercially unviable then they have failed in their job; they have failed to design a product that ensures their organisation can remain competitive in the marketplace and in doing so, they not only risk the livelihood of their organisation, but also their longer term employment prospects.
---
Read the rest at: http://ow.ly/18V6p