Supply Chain Management during Design, with Kevin Bailey (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

Dianna Deeney interviews Kevin Bailey, from Design 1st, about supply chain management during design: how product design engineers and product development leadership can be affected by and affect the supply chain for their products.

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Kevin
Kevin Bailey is the Founder and CEO of Design 1st, a leading product development consultancy. With a dedicated team specializing in various aspects of product development, including industrial design, user experience, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, Design 1st is at the forefront of delivering top-quality product designs. Kevin is known for his expertise in integrating cost considerations early in the design process and helping clients navigate supply chain solutions, ensuring a seamless development journey for their projects.

Kevin and Dianna talk about:

• How to approach supply chain management from a risk point-of-view, including balancing risk and opportunity.
• Kevin's framework for successful supply chain management: FACT. Feasible, Available, Constraints, and Test.
• Engineers' responsibilities toward supply chain management, and Leaderships responsibilities toward enabling those activities.
• His views of the current state of supply chain management challenges.

Hear Kevin's take on why engineers need to factor in supply chain management while designing products and how crucial it is for leadership and other teammates to lend support to engineers when liaising with suppliers. We'll also talk about how the size of the project and the roles within it should influence the product engineer's approach.

Don't miss out on Kevin's thoughts on the intersection of AI and product development and a sneak peek into his company's upcoming project. Join us for this insightful episode, packed with actionable advice for product development leaders, designers, and engineers.

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About me
Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.

She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.

She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.

Transcript

Dianna Deeney: 0:02

Welcome to an episode of the Quality During Design podcast. I'm Dianna Deeney. Let's talk about supply chain management, specifically how it relates to product development processes and engineers and the decisions that we need to make when we're designing stuff. In this episode, I interview Kevin Bailey about this topic how product design engineers and product development leadership can be affected by, and also affect, the supply chain for their products, and how that can affect the long-term product design success. This interview is part of our series A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates. Kevin Bailey is the founder and CEO of Design First, a leading product development consultancy. He is an engineer and he's known for his expertise in integrating cost considerations early in the design process and helping clients navigate supply chain solutions. In this episode, kevin and I talk about how to approach supply chain management from a risk point of view, including balancing risk and opportunity. Kevin shares his framework for successful supply chain management, which is a four-letter acronym, fact. We also talk about responsibilities towards supply chain management, how engineers are related and how leadership is responsible. Kevin also answers my questions about the current state of supply chain management. I look forward to introducing you to Kevin and our conversation after this brief introduction.

Dianna Deeney: 2:01

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. Each week, we talk about ways to use quality during design and product development. I'm your host, diana Dini. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom. Welcome to another episode of Quality During Design. Today we have a guest interview. I'm talking with Kevin Bailey. He's the founder and CEO of Design First, a business that offers product design, product development and transfer to manufacturing. He's passionate about product design and he's a business executive. He helps guide CEOs, startups and established companies through the maze of hardware product development. Kevin is here today to talk about supply chain management and ways that affect engineering decisions and share some actionable steps to best work with supply chain managers. Kevin, welcome to the Quality During Design podcast.

Kevin Bailey: 3:16

Hi Diana, it's a pleasure to be here.

Dianna Deeney: 3:18

You have a very broad and deep experience in the engineering world. What are some of your biggest likes about product design and how do you relate to supply chain management? That's a great question.

Kevin Bailey: 3:33

I've been doing this since the early 80s. I've been at this quite a few years. The things I've learned over time, working with large companies and with small companies, is the nature of how supply decisions lead to reliability issues, as you, as designers and engineers, make decisions early stage on what a product will be, what it includes, what componentry will be part of it, and the overall performance and function and specification of features within a product.

Dianna Deeney: 4:07

Now, do you get involved directly with supply chain management itself or are you working with other people, that you're coordinating with other people from an engineering standpoint on supply chain management?

Kevin Bailey: 4:24

The answer is both the types of clients. We're a team of 30. So we're a cross-functional group that includes engineers, designers, business strategists, marketing strategists, as well as production support and transfer to manufacturing people. So there's different types of clients that come through Design First, which are either larger companies that maybe they have a portfolio of products. They want some help by a specialist team in one of the areas they may feel weakened, but they've got their own in-house product development. We deal with other startups, companies that are new to hardware product development or physical product development devices. We also deal with entrepreneurs that are new to the business world and supply, as well as new to product development. So in each of those cases we offer a different set of services to augment what our clients currently have in place.

Dianna Deeney: 5:19

So you're not only working with the suppliers themselves. It sounds like there's some people on your team with some expertise on suppliers working with them too, but then you're also interfacing with your clients, so you've probably interfaced with many different companies in the different ways that they do supply chain management. Is that correct?

Kevin Bailey: 5:42

Yes, so I've been working in, I guess, started working with a large corporation, ortele Networks, and did telecommunication products for the 80s and the 90s and in that the coordinating with manufacturing was critical to any design from the start to the finish and the transfer into manufacturing.

Kevin Bailey: 6:02

So when I started design first in 96, that importance of having connected supply chain and working with overseas and North American manufacturers and suppliers of components was just a normal part of business. So today more than half our clients were coordinating some form of their supply chain strategy, supply chain contract setups and we work with our clients as a group that represents them, with manufacturers and suppliers, so that our clients don't have to become fully knowledgeable in all the contractual elements as we get product design together for them. But it's really a meeting of two people, a partner manufacturer with a client and we're the glue in between. We're temporary, we coordinate things from a new design idea or a change to an existing product refresh and we get out the minute our values are not needed and those two parties continue on. But we engage daily with multiple suppliers, manufacturers all over the world.

Dianna Deeney: 7:05

I see and yes, I know from my experience in product design that the supply chain can get really complicated. There was a project I had worked on. It was a small spring that was gold plated, but it was critical and we needed to work with the suppliers and try to develop a relationship with them. And it was a challenge because the product that was being designed was sort of custom half custom and half off the shelf so there wasn't a real desire of suppliers to develop a relationship. And then we find out that there were three deep suppliers of the supplier that their processes affected the quality of the product we were getting. So that was something that we had to manage and be really careful about. I was a quality engineer on that project and just working with and managing those suppliers is a big job and it's pretty critical.

Kevin Bailey: 8:06

Yeah, and that you just done a perfect example in terms of customized off-the-shelf parts being one of the critical things you want to manage as a design group whether you're inside a company or an outside consultancy like ours is to separate the areas to focus on as you go from the concept through the detailed engineering, through the prototyping and testing and into the transfer to manufacturing.

Kevin Bailey: 8:31

You want to be having discussions with the affected parties supply side and client side on parts that you put on and what we do is a high risk list and those high risk lists would include a part like that spring, and the conversations would continue on based on a variety of factors.

Kevin Bailey: 8:51

This gets into sort of the nature of how much you can customize within the budget you have, the time you have, the size of the program you have and the intended market. And size of the intended market leads to decisions around risk and decisions around reliability and decisions around choices as you're making putting a product concept together. Because if you design product concepts in a void where you're going to do the best thing you possibly can for a user and you don't understand the key risks that you're inherently putting in by the choices you make on that small set of parts that are risky, you bake in failure and many, many groups of design teams hand that problem off to the supply chain and to the operational team that takes over as product sales and returns. And it's really important to have that conversation with clients early on while we make trade-offs in the concept, because we're looking for a balanced concept of opportunity and risk. We're not looking for the best concept a user could possibly have.

Dianna Deeney: 9:55

Yes, and you mentioned that these kind of design decisions get pushed into the operations to be able to manage especially and I think it's more common now since 2020 and all the supply chain issues that a product design will be specced out. Maybe there's a particular material listed on a component, but then that material people can't get it. Maybe the company is not available to anyone out of business or that particular resin isn't available anymore, so you have to find substitutes, but that leads into all sorts of product testing problems later, if your design spec is so nailed down to a particular material, do you help your customers navigate that kind of thing too, where they're in the front end of the design, choosing an alternate supplier to identify alternate suppliers or something that's already specced? What's your experience with that kind of thing?

Kevin Bailey: 10:59

We've got lots of experience in that area. So I'll give a high-level example of that. Let's talk about that spring and it's part of a product that's being designed in that design. Let's say there's 100 parts in that design and 80 of the parts are electronics and 20 of the parts are custom or off-the-shelf chemicals. We'd like to bucket the parts and the bill of materials, even early stage where it's high-level major items, not all the components figured out yet, but above the known components or parts that are going on, how many would hit a high-risk list?

Kevin Bailey: 11:33

It's high-risk because it's not a known design. Someone has to design it. It's custom. Or it's a design that has to come from a supplier where they have to customize it. That would be the spring. Or it's an off-the-shelf part where there's many suppliers and it's a mature part and the specs are well known. Of those 100 parts you may be dealing with, two or three.

Kevin Bailey: 11:55

Let's say the spring is one of those that are typically customized off the shelf where a third-party supplier has agreed to do it for you. Therefore it's sole sourced and now you've got to make a decision as a business team, through a client who's spending money in product development, whether you want to address that risk today or bring the conversation up again in detailed engineering, where maybe we can work through the details to get rid of that high-risk and remove the part or change it or find something different. But eventually, through the prototyping and testing, and transfer to manufacturing your high-risk list, the items that you know may give you trouble. You spend more time talking about it. You spend more time thinking about whether you want to do a sole source. Do you want to invest the money? Because product development is time-sensitive and money-sensitive and you want to bring those conversations up versus talk about the whole product or ignore the risk of that one component because the people that are making business decisions aren't aware of it.

Dianna Deeney: 12:51

Now I like that. You've mentioned risk quite often. Now I'm wondering you know some companies do their own risk management, but you're doing a different kind of risk. You're looking at supply chain management risk. Do a lot of your clients already have a system or a way to evaluate the risk of their suppliers, or is this something that you help them develop?

Kevin Bailey: 13:16

We help people develop this. I find in large mature companies they've put enough time and effort to have departments that are risk-in-reliability oriented. But when you reach out to a consultant like us to do something that you maybe have not done before, you need help with. Trying to embed that mature process or forming process in your company into a third party is very difficult. So clients that find us are relieved that actually that's the way we think and so we can quickly come up to speed if they have something oriented around reliability in their process of product development.

Kevin Bailey: 13:52

If they don't, then we're actually refreshing experience because we're actually creating the conversations and walking through the processes. They don't have to be laborious, they're just helping people identify where we should focus. And so because our process and our teams are mature in what we do with clients, it comes naturally and it doesn't cost anymore to have these assessments and discussions. It does cost more if a client listens and says you know what, we should test for that or we should dual source that or we, then there's time spent to go and do that. Our job is to bring the options and risks up and the high risk, not every risk. There's lots of risks in product development, that we mature and work out and they're at the working level, at the engineering level. But there are high risk lists that are business focused, marketing focused, part failure, product function failure related. That you want to elevate the conversations, you want to make sure they get in the right level of attention.

Dianna Deeney: 14:50

So if a product design engineer was developing, they were part of a team developing a sub component of a product and they wanted to consider the supplier management risk and just by nature of them working with some of the suppliers, they can identify some of them. Who on the cross-functional team would it be good for them to talk more about it with, if they had to go ahead from their project manager? Yes, go ahead, do this. This sounds like a great idea. You mentioned that there's a lot of different risks to take into consideration, like marketing and the business risks. Are there particular people that you look to talk with that are part of the organization when you're developing this list of risky components, or is it more of and or maybe it's just your experience in helping a lot of other businesses through this?

Kevin Bailey: 15:47

Well there's. I think every company is unique in their product development process. I'd follow the traditional gate process and it's a rigorous step through procedures. So if I pick any company that we tend to work with, some may have no process at all and we're really the influencers on how we're going to proceed. Other companies may have much more rigorous processes, but if I'm an engineer inside a company that has a rigorous process already, then you have to look and see what are they doing? How are they doing that design? Is there someone am I talking with?

Kevin Bailey: 16:26

Let's say, you mentioned an engineer making a component selection or designing around a function or a feature. Maybe they're creating a mechanism inside a product. Who else is on the team? Because it will be a time constrained exercise and if they have a manager that says, go ahead, is there an industrial designer on the team that's representing the user? Are there user trials? Is there a marketing person that cares about that particular feature? Is there a manufacturer maybe internal someone that's on the manufacturing team that I could pass these things by? Or can I go and talk to other engineers that maybe have more experience to say I'm designing this a certain way?

Kevin Bailey: 17:11

The biggest thing to think about is am I using custom parts? Because if you're using custom parts immediately, you've got capital, tooling of some form or machining costs or whatever, so there's an extra cost that's over and above just picking that part. And if I'm doing a customized part where I found something I need a manufacturer to modify, that's one of the most complex decisions you'll make in terms of its effect on the company, the business. What is the process internally to actually decide whether that's the only way around this and that we agree that we have to move forward with that level of complexity? And if so, then you do want to talk to manufacturing, you want to talk to the business group, you want to identify cost of that particular decision and you want to identify how many are you going to build.

Kevin Bailey: 18:01

Because when you customize something and you're only making four of them, your odds of getting high quality are pretty low. You're making a thousand. They're getting better if you're making 10,000, because there is a point, from when you customize something to when you know enough about that product's maturity and its behavior in the environment, you're going to put it where you know its chance of not failing is reasonable or matches the other elements of the product so that it doesn't stand out as an early failure component relative to everything else. Everything else has a five year life or 10 year life and you're baking something in the 20 to the last three months. You're creating a problem.

Dianna Deeney: 18:41

Yeah.

Kevin Bailey: 18:42

But you don't know that until you've done the design, it's been tested, it may be in the field already till you find there's an issue with the paint flaking off and creating a battery contact problem, because that flaking paint is whatever it's going to be. You have no idea what it's going to be because you're not going to be able to test everything. So the long-winded answer if you're in that engineering seat and you're doing something that's custom, who else is around you that you can tap into? How is your company set up for getting feedback from the market, from the user, from the supply? If you have none of those choices and you're on your own, then you're doing your best and you're guessing and maybe using the Internet to look at potential failures in that area, but you're left with no resource.

Dianna Deeney: 19:32

Yeah, it's a very holistic decision when choosing components. It's a big responsibility of a design engineer not just designing whatever it is they're designing for their product, but also choosing the components and the suppliers to work with.

Kevin Bailey: 19:50

You're saying design engineers, but there's also the industrial designers, which are the representatives of the users and the configure of the user experience. You're looking for an opportunity that solves the particular task that this new product is going to provide, that does better than whatever other alternatives people have. So you have to take risks. You can't design out risks, because when you do that, you design out the new opportunity. Typically, you have to take the risk. So all you're doing is a little bit of value analysis as you decide yeah, it's a custom part that has to happen, no choice. Now what do we do about it? The first check is do we need it? In many cases, you do. You don't have a choice. The second check, then, is are we going to watch this more closely? Are we going to do some testing or evaluation and modeling at some stage here, before it hits the market? Are all the business people aware of that risk?

Dianna Deeney: 20:45

Does your team get involved in evaluating those things the reliability of a product or do you work with other groups that do that?

Kevin Bailey: 20:57

Both again. So we're absolutely involved in the identification. We're absolutely involved in any hall test, lab test, bench test model, anything that's quick, that gives us an assessment of the risks that we see. So the FMEA is the failure mode. It's to sit down as a senior or experienced group of people in the area and say, okay, what would we test, because we know this is a higher risk element, what can we test now, what can we test later, once we have a more refined part? Because many times you have to wait until a manufacturer has made the part to your final assessments. But you're doing those tests at the right times to qualify it and remove it or change it prior to just handing it into a system where everything else is fixed and then they find the problem and that leads always to changes in other things and just the mess that nobody wants to get into and everyone does, because they don't identify these things really enough.

Dianna Deeney: 21:53

On when you're doing these risk assessments of the supplied components with the companies that you work with, what percentage of them significantly change the plan for what they were going to do with their components? I guess I'm asking about the kind of effectiveness you see with using this risk approach to supplier management. Is it a big effect, is it huge, and what are some of the comments that you might get from the leadership of these companies about doing this process?

Kevin Bailey: 22:29

I'm kind of lucky in our team is kind of lucky because we have experienced people.

Kevin Bailey: 22:32

So we don't ever design ourselves through ignorance into an area where, once we've configured things, or as we're configuring things, we make a choice on a particular customization that leads to a problem in a later stage where we didn't know the process well enough, we didn't understand the supplier well enough.

Kevin Bailey: 22:54

So early sampling of parts that will be customized or the elements that we feel are on the risk list is important. But if you happen to be in that group where you don't have the experience in a particular area, you may not know that you have a risk. That's the biggest problem and that risk will carry on until someone identifies it. And that truly is the value of cross function is that someone is with experience, takes a look and says, oh, I see a risk there, and so fundamentally, the changes that occur are based on the experience set of the people that are doing that early assessment of the particular thing you're trying to include in the product or the function you're trying to provide for the product. If you don't identify that as risk because you don't have a good cross functional experience team, then you're going to go through major change later on, like it or not.

Dianna Deeney: 23:55

Yes, early feedback and independent reviews, and I spent my experience.

Kevin Bailey: 24:01

And how to do it without putting a major burden on the project, because that's always how leadership looks at it.

Kevin Bailey: 24:07

It's like you know how can we do a major review constantly and it's you know different things need different levels of review.

Kevin Bailey: 24:14

You know you have a value add conversation with a manufacturing group after you finished an entire product concept.

Kevin Bailey: 24:23

Those conversations get very tricky because the manufacturers don't have quite enough information on the parts to be able to really dig deep enough and give you good value.

Kevin Bailey: 24:31

Good information and so that you know buried risk sticks around until you're finished most of the detail engineering. And then they get you know true drawings and true specs and dimensions and then all of a sudden it pops up or they couldn't add value at the first conversation in the concept area but they can add a ton of value now that you've finished it all. And so experience teams actually have very specific conversations, not on the product overall but on very specific elements of very specific parts, with a potential supplier, manufacturer or several of them to assess opportunity and risk and supply early stage. But you need a facilitation. You need an experienced person to actually know what to talk about when many companies don't have that experience. That's why when companies find our team, they're quite relieved especially if they've been through it before that we help navigate that for them, so that the change and change management that happens later on is far more predictable.

Dianna Deeney: 25:32

Yeah, I can see that. The earlier that you can intervene and catch that stuff, definitely the better.

Kevin Bailey: 25:39

Yeah, and you talk about cross-functional teams. You know there's two conversations there. One is cross-functional design team. That's saying, you know, let's maximize this opportunity, let's make the best product industrial designers, the engineers, the marketing people that say give us a concept, make modifications to existing products, so it does this new feature, new function, new thing better than anything on the market. And that's a cross-functional team that's focused on user value. And there's a cross-functional conversation on business and market, the operational teams, the supply teams. And that cross-functional conversation is more risk-oriented but highly needed.

Kevin Bailey: 26:24

Is it feasible? You know the physics of what you're trying to do. Is it available? The manufacturing process. You know the suppliers for the volumes you're looking for, that you've got somebody out there in the world who wants to do this and that they're going to be able to do it with the specifications you need.

Kevin Bailey: 26:41

The constraints, you know, is the thing you're asking for, aligned with the project and the budget. If you're only making a hundred of these, you've got to make different decisions many cases than if you're making a hundred thousand. And the last thing is tested. Really, it's about all those high-risk things. Can they be tested in some form, low-cost, early on, to assess and get some learning from that particular risk and the one thing you can avoid is new data that comes in because the clients discover something else, or users, or through some exploration or experimentation or early marketing sales efforts, you've found a client that wants something new or different. Or those are business and marketing cross-functional decision teams and they're typically focused. They love the opportunity, but they're focused on feasibility and doobility. So feasible, available constraints and testing. I call it fact, but that's oh, that's your framework fact.

Dianna Deeney: 27:43

What was it again?

Kevin Bailey: 27:43

Yeah, feasible, the physics available, you know, the manufacturing process and suppliers is available to you, not to Apple. Apple can do things you can't do Right. So is it available to you as a design team, as a company constraints you know? Is it suited to the project and the budget, or the numbers and the volumes and the quality you're trying to instill in this particular high-risk element, which can be the spring as the example, and then the testing piece of it, the ability to qualify, quantify, get samples, really debug, de-risk, and sort of whether it's the best you can do because you really want the opportunity, right, you know, on the other side, this is a careful balance between opportunity and your ability to actually pull it off in constrained timeframes, constrained budgets and you know your market.

Dianna Deeney: 28:32

I'm going to give you another scenario here where the engineers are developing a relationship with a new kind of supplier because, as you mentioned, you know the company is looking at business risks and the sort of things that you're talking about with your fact framework and they've decided to take a leap and do something innovative, which means they need to develop some new relationships with new suppliers. And the engineers are, you know, researching. They're talking with other engineers and other supplier groups, developing a relationship. At what point does the engineer? Is it best for the engineer to involve other groups in the other assessments of that supplier? So the supplier may be technically capable, but maybe there are other business facets of the supplier that don't really meet the standards of the company.

Kevin Bailey: 29:32

Yeah, this is a great area for conversation and I'll talk to the leaders first of that, the project management, the people that are putting engineer in harm's way by putting in front of suppliers and it's a, it's a dance. So it's a timed conversation. So in product development, that we do, and I'm sure it's the same anywhere where you're investigating particular options. So let's say that spring you were looking at, it could be a leaf spring, it could be a coil spring, it could be foam, but whatever it was, I as an engineer, a designer, either one, I'm looking at how I would solve that problem. You know, add that spring force and the dampening force or whatever I need. And I need to go find materials. So I'm going to go out to a spring supplier sorry, a coil spring supplier, leaf spring supplier, a foam supplier to get their spec sheets, to look at the you know variables of what I'm trying to do and make a decision.

Kevin Bailey: 30:33

Maybe I look at three oil suppliers and three spring suppliers. So I'm reaching out to all these suppliers. So what information am I giving them about my company, the company that I'm representing when I'm doing the design? Because if I'm not careful, I'll be going to maybe a third party supply group, as it sounded like you did which, when you do that, you kick off a supply chain cost that you can't get out of.

Kevin Bailey: 30:57

Once you've made that introduction or made that reach out in that first party response to you, they may not be the manufacturer, even though they represent themselves as one. So now you need the leaders of the company, the managers and so on, to instruct the engineers on the approach you take and what you talk about and what you don't talk about when you're engaging suppliers or potential suppliers, knowing that you're going to reach out to 10 or 15 of them in three different types of springs and eventually you'll get down to one, but whatever, when you get to, you don't want to hamstring the supply discussion that's going to go on once your production and supply teams get involved and, as a company, you want to give your engineering groups and your design groups some guidance but not shackles some guidance as to how you approach the types of information you share and make sure that they have someone in that supply group, should they need them, to help coordinate discussion, sign an NDA, work through any details of the high probability suppliers once they've done their first round.

Dianna Deeney: 32:01

Yeah, so those are good examples of things that, if the company is not setting that up, that's definitely something that the engineers should be asking about and looking for. Is that correct?

Kevin Bailey: 32:13

Yeah, it's not really their responsibility, but ultimately, if you want to be a good product developer and a good product designer, then supply is an essential element of making good decisions, and you're making design decisions and function and specification decisions. One of those other decisions is where in the world is this going to come from and does it match the supply chain strategy for the overall product?

Dianna Deeney: 32:37

Now with I think I mentioned earlier the 2020, when we saw the first 10 of a lot of the supply chain management issues that everybody's been dealing with and I think they're still dealing with it. Is there any lingering issue that is still elevated from 2020 and on with companies and their supply chain? Is there an elevated issue that you're seeing that just keeps coming up or just is not going away?

Kevin Bailey: 33:10

Dana, yeah, I'm going to go back and make one more statement, if I could, on the last thing, and then we can talk about that next.

Dianna Deeney: 33:17

Yes.

Kevin Bailey: 33:18

One of the things in doing this for the 40 years. There's two types of product development. There's the product development where designers make decisions on components and they pick anywhere they can find, any suppliers they can find just to demonstrate a design, and then that design is then handed over to either engineering or manufacturing and then they start to figure out supply and where that spring part is really going to come from. And then you have the iteration of can they find one that meets the specs of the original design team? That got sample components from someone in their neighborhood or in their region or in their country, whatever it is. But they made a choice and it's available there, so they use it.

Kevin Bailey: 34:02

And our objective and our recommendation and the way we work with our clients is you are picking the final supply components from day one in the concept stage.

Kevin Bailey: 34:14

You don't always. You may have three or four you can get from it and all the off the shelf parts and components that are coming and you have multiple sources. You don't have to worry about that. The customized off the shelf and the fully custom parts are the areas where you want to really think more carefully about it, and so if your organization is a handoff organization where you can get a component from anywhere.

Kevin Bailey: 34:39

You embed cost in your product development, you embed change and you embed reliability and risk in your organization. And so I've always opposed that and I've always guided or recommended to clients that they impose a little longer time but a little more effort by the design engineering teams to force them to do the supply strategy as well, the best they can, because many times you don't know where the final manufacturer is. You might know a region, you might know an area that is the target, or maybe there's two, but you actually impose that in the design process upfront and you'll find you do a lot fewer change management issues and extended budgets and things as you get to the later stages in the transfer to manufacturing and getting ready for production.

Dianna Deeney: 35:26

I think that's good advice and it's challenging for the engineers but and it's not their responsibility.

Kevin Bailey: 35:33

It's not their responsibility. Leadership has to impose that and give the right amount of support to that. Reach out for the engineers so they can do that, but it's definitely not the engineer's responsibility. That's why it doesn't get done until leadership actually imposes that that's good advice to organizations and product development leaders.

Dianna Deeney: 35:53

The more you can solidify some of those decide decisions earlier, the better it is for the whole design project and that's what I'm hearing you say.

Kevin Bailey: 36:03

And if you can't build your high risk list, leave those components on it, bring them up, have the conversation as you step through your gates and as you solidify your design. Just make sure the business teams and everyone understands those particular components are risky for these reasons. You haven't got a final supplier here and it's a custom part, or it's got a particular thing that's risky. So there's a variety of different things that might come out. Or the material may not be available in the areas where you may plan to build the product, or it requires a redesign. But even if it does, as long as the business teams understand, there's no surprises as they budget the product development stages.

Dianna Deeney: 36:39

And that's also good advice just being able to communicate that, because I've seen instances where the people making decisions about the design and the components that are picked they know an awful lot about that kind of thing, about the different risks, or they've thought through potential failures or reliability concerns, but oftentimes it may not get carried through. So having the risk level of the components and communicating that, that would be really good information to pass along from the design engineer, even if it's open and in questions like you mentioned.

Kevin Bailey: 37:18

Yeah, exactly that In my world, the house of quality, the quality of function deployment. I'm not sure if you've used that tool that's been around since the 80s, which is a technique for risk and requirements. It's heavy, it's laborious, large companies use it, but this is a lean version of that similar tool.

Dianna Deeney: 37:39

Okay, yes, I am familiar with that and sometimes FMEAs are also helpful. But I can see having a separate, even if it comes out of the FMEA. Having a separate communication that ties back to that risk is an important thing to communicate.

Kevin Bailey: 37:59

Yeah, it also justifies the FMEA. You're doing FMEA on the things you feel are risky. You can't do them on everything.

Dianna Deeney: 38:06

Right.

Kevin Bailey: 38:08

That's just one of the steps in the assessment. If you can't evaluate it, you can't get samples and test it. At least you can do an FMEA with knowledgeable people to say here's where the risks might lie, so you can track that.

Dianna Deeney: 38:19

Okay, well, I think those are good actions, good solutions to some of the challenges with supply chain management and engineering.

Kevin Bailey: 38:27

And the question? I'll just answer the quick one where's supply chain going? Now Things are stabilizing. Availability is much better. We only find a couple of components, micro, certain micros, and still that are still long lead times 20, 30, 40, 50 week plus. But many other things are readily available electronics-wise and general materials-wise.

Dianna Deeney: 38:51

So things are starting to stabilize and we're not seeing all that volatility in the supply chain as much anymore.

Kevin Bailey: 38:58

That's correct.

Dianna Deeney: 38:59

Well, that's good news for everybody. Now may I ask you, I guess, two last questions. If a product designer was listening to this episode and they wanted to improve their supply chain management skills or ideas, do you have any recommendations for where they can learn more or have one step that they can do today to improve their situation?

Kevin Bailey: 39:28

The answer is there's different. It really probably depends a little bit on your experience, where you're at and your organization that you're in and, to date, how you do product development and I like to talk about when you're doing a new product design. We all have a picture in our head of what that means, and if I'm sitting in an automotive plant and I'm on the engine team, then product design for me is maybe making variations on some of the air flow channels or some of the castings, or maybe some of the materials we're using in some of the moving parts. If I'm a product designer that's in a consumer goods group, then my world is different. I've got a much more user centric and I've got a lot more marketing data coming at me and I need to make decisions there. So a mental picture of what new product design is about has a couple of facets, which is how big is this project?

Kevin Bailey: 40:35

There are companies that do very big projects and you've got the budgets to have reliability teams and facilitators and there's a you're in a very mature environment of product development and other companies smaller companies typically are maybe mature, but their processes are quite a bit leaner, it's true, from the hip. In many cases it's taking existing experience with products that are in the field and problems with those products in the field and you're doing design changes. So, how big the project is, is it incremental design, when you're making modifications to something existing and fairly mature, or are you doing fundamental, groundbreaking something new? You know Dyson, when he first started the vacuum cleaners, you know he went at vacuum cleaners, a very mature market, and he went after it in a different way and there was lots of reasons he did and functionality wasn't good to start. But visuals are fantastic and he built functionality over time.

Dianna Deeney: 41:38

Now he's building airplane jets right.

Kevin Bailey: 41:40

Yeah, but it's all based on that fluid flow of experience that they've had over time and developing it. So if you're a product engineer, product designer and you're in an organization, where are you and what kind of products do you do incremental or fundamental? And there's a complexity spectrum on top of that. If I'm doing incremental or fundamental on a skateboard, I got 50 components. If I'm doing incremental or fundamental design on a car, I've got 70,000 components. And what role do I play in that?

Kevin Bailey: 42:14

You know what's my ability to influence the process, which we've been talking about today. And then how I fit into that process and who's around me to support me. How cross functional is the place where I'm working in terms of when I want information, when do I get it from? Do I have to dream it up? Do I have to guess, or can I hold on people around me? I may ultimately still have to make a decision. That's risky and unique, but how much support do I have?

Kevin Bailey: 42:43

And then, how big is the project from a volume point of view? If it's small, you take on a different tactic than if it's big. You're not always designing the perfect product for the perfect user, losing that ego and getting focused on the business at hand, which is something appropriate for the situation, and it has to include not only the user but the business and the supply. So, training, learning, reading up on tools like some of the ones we discussed and I've looked at your website, you've got some other tools as well that are great but just to get a framework for the balance between reliability, which is risk in terms of risk assessment, risk qualification, risk identification and risk management, and opportunity, which is get the best product you can that meets and differentiate yourself over other choices Users have out there in the market, so that you have a better shot at selling, supporting and maintaining or growing the company that you're working for, working with.

Dianna Deeney: 43:43

Last great advice, kevin weighing risk and opportunity and just understanding the kind of organization that you are working in. Sometimes we get so detailed in the daily minutiae that we need a reminder to just look up and look around and understand how our situation might be a little bit different than others. Yeah, and reach out.

Kevin Bailey: 44:04

That information is out there in the world and the use of AI for example, writing product requirements, talking learning about the user personas you can do that on your own. You don't need to wait for a marketing team to come in. There's things you can do to get more information in front of you to make timely decisions now, and AI has been a great tool for that. We're starting to use more and more, not as a solution, but as an input to the conversation.

Dianna Deeney: 44:30

Yes, I've been playing it around for my own purposes too. It is good as something to get ideas, but then you have to follow through on your own. But that might be another conversation for another interview. Maybe, kevin is your experience using AI in the engineering field? That sounds very interesting.

Kevin Bailey: 44:53

And supply field and marketing field and design strategy field and, like each of those elements, the use of it as a research tool, some of the embedded AI that's going into chip sets now that make products more functional, using less battery power to do more processing at the edge in the device itself versus reliance on the cloud, as the device helps a person using it to perform a task and do it more effectively, more efficiently, quicker.

Kevin Bailey: 45:22

Whatever it's going to be that are, but the choices now in the embedded learning engines that are now available to product development groups are out there. Customers and companies that don't understand that need to reach out to companies like ours to help them embed it into what they're doing, where we become a part of their team for a short period of time. Or companies that have new ideas that don't do hardware product development. Reach out to companies like ours that actually can help configure new value, to help you embed those new features, because your other competitors are going to be doing it Speaking of, how can people find out more about you and your company?

Kevin Bailey: 46:03

Super simple designfirstcom, design1stcom. You'll see we're well documented on the web. It's easy to get hold of us and have a conversation. Conversations are free. If we can help each other and we're a good fit for what you're trying to do, then we'd love to help.

Dianna Deeney: 46:19

And how to integrate AI into your product design sounds like one of the areas you could help with.

Kevin Bailey: 46:24

We're actually going to do a little pop up. We're just finishing some work there to help people start to take some of the hype out of AI and how does it work with product development. We're doing a little special on our website where we'll be talking about that over the next couple of weeks. It won't be available for a couple of weeks, but it's a topical area and we'll keep revising and updating and showing people some of the tools and some of the ways and techniques that AI can influence what you're doing in product development.

Dianna Deeney: 46:48

Now, would people subscribe to get those updates, or will they be posted on your website?

Kevin Bailey: 46:53

They're posted on the website. My marketing team may request an email from you, but they're there so that we can share the information.

Dianna Deeney: 47:03

Okay, great. Well, thank you, Kevin, for coming on the show today and talking with us about suppliers and engineers and product development. It's very interesting, thank you.

Kevin Bailey: 47:14

And then I've never met a design engineer that wants to talk about reliability and quality while they're creating new concepts. And I thank you for bringing up the conversation, because it's just a balanced conversation. As we all strive to do cool new things, it's also our responsibility as engineers and as designers in the process of making sure the thing that we design actually reaches a market and serves a purpose.

Dianna Deeney: 47:38

Well, thank you for that. I hope you enjoyed my interview with Kevin. If you'd like to learn more about Kevin and his company, visit qualityduringdesigncom. This episode is summarized under the podcast blog and there are several links to Kevin's company and there are also links to our other interview episodes. This podcast is a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.