I met with an engineering leader over coffee at Starbucks today.
At one point, they said:
“Can I be really honest? My industry needs Engineering Assurance more than they would admit.”
That got my attention.
Their point was simple.
When you manufacture relatively few units compared with industries like automotive, leadership may not immediately see the value of investing additional time upfront to risk-reduce a design.
Instead, the pressure can become:
Release the design. Hit the milestone. Protect the schedule.
And on the dashboard, everything may look great.
Design released on time. ✅
Schedule variance under control. ✅
Cost variance under control. ✅
Until a technical or manufacturing problem shows up later.
Now you're:
- Redesigning.
- Re-analyzing.
- Re-testing.
- Re-tooling.
- Re-building.
And suddenly the time you “saved” earlier looks very expensive.
We call these Cost of Poor Business Quality (COPBQ).
The problem isn't that engineering teams don't know how to solve problems.
Engineers are usually very good at solving problems.
The better question is:
How many of those problems could have been prevented from reaching that stage in the first place?
That's where Engineering Assurance matters.
DFMEA, PFMEA, requirements traceability, robust design reviews, manufacturing readiness, and technical risk assessments aren't paperwork exercises.
Done properly, they're investments in finding problems when they are still relatively inexpensive to fix.
Sometimes slowing down early is exactly how you move faster later.
What do you think?
Are organizations putting enough emphasis on early design risk reduction, or are our metrics unintentionally rewarding teams for releasing designs before they're truly ready?