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Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 7

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

CAD leadership requires more than intuition and observation.
In order to make prudent, practical decisions about how to best deploy next-generation
CAD tools to achieve your quality and efficiency goals, you need access to
information about how CAD technology influences product development. The most
accurate way to assess the collective and individual impacts of CAD tools is to
establish baseline productivity statistics so you can document, evaluate, and
analyze departmental performance.

How long is your average design cycle? What are your typical
development costs? Do you track the number of design errors and engineering
change orders (ECOs) per development cycle, or the volume of scrap produced on
an annual basis? Are you monitoring the time and money that are spent on
physical prototyping? In order to assess whether a particular design solution
is having a positive effect on your bottom line—and generating a return on your
CAD investment—you need to document and analyze your group’s productivity.

In addition to providing valuable information on your
department’s overall performance, and the role CAD tools play in contributing
to increased efficiency, documenting productivity can help you standardize on
what works well, address areas that are problematic, and acknowledge success.

As a design manager, your performance, and ultimately, your
compensation, is tied to the success of every member of your team. Their
success relates to the tools, training, and processes that you put in place. As
a CAD leader, you need a scorecard for determining how well your team is doing,
so you can assess whether your CAD tools are helping your team members move
forward or holding them back. With this information, you can embrace processes
that are more efficient, rectify areas of weakness, and use objective, factual
information to recognize and reward achievement.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper – Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader