Introductions
Hi everybody. I’m Michael Roberts, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at SPK and Associates. And today we’re discussing a topic that’s shaping the future of product development and engineering. And that’s the role of managed services and managed services consulting in scaling engineering projects.
If you’re an engineering leader, a CAD administrator, or part of a product development team, you’ve probably felt the pressure of trying to get your product out to market, market readiness, improving efficiency, and reducing the time to market, all while keeping your tools, systems, and workflows running seamlessly. So to explore how SPK helps organizations achieve that, I’m joined with VP of service delivery, Edwin Chung. Ed, feel free to introduce yourself.
Hi, as Michael just said, I’m VP of professional services here. I work closely with Michael and oversee all the delivery to our many clients of which have all have R&D or engineering departments that benefit already or could benefit from additional managed services. And I’m happy to provide examples if that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, Michael.
Managed Services for Scaling Engineering Projects
Yeah. So Ed, let’s start off with maybe a simple existing customer-specific example that you can give. Can you describe a scenario where our managed services have played a critical role in helping a client scale their engineering team or engineering projects efficiently, and how did we support this goal and accelerate their product and product readiness?
Example of Managed Services
Yes, I have so many examples. Where do I begin? Maybe let me start with what managed services is, right? I think a lot of times, or all the time, our customers come to us and they have a project in mind. Everyone has a project in mind, right? Like hey, I really need this AI thing implemented. I really need this thing fixed. I really need this migration done. That’s a very common one.
But all of them we go in and the managed services captures all the things that are, I’ll say too small to be a project, right? Who is managing the usernames and passwords of this thing? Turns out it’s your principal software engineer managing access, and you know he or she hates it and wishes someone else would do it, but it’s too small to make a project out of, right, or those sort of things. And so to come in a lot of times what we do to capture that here’s my example is is we’ll come in and do an inventory.
How Managed Services Solves Common Issues
We’ll do an inventory of all the engineers’ tools, right? So that and we’ll keep it into a single web page with a list of tools. Here’s a brief description of what they are. Importantly, here’s how many of those license assets or software assets that we have, and how much they cost. Big fat list. As we grow that list, it gets deeper and deeper, right? Here’s this list, here are frequently asked questions, and here’s how you get access to this internal tool. Here’s why you should use this internal tool, and here’s who should use this internal tool. That’s it. That’s a perfect example. And it really solves the biggest for me personally doing some engineering work myself. My biggest frustration. Is this yours, Michael?
My biggest frustration I can never find the number 10 wrench. No matter how many number 10 wrenches or sockets I have, they’re all gone. I wish I could pay someone a managed service to clean up my stuff so that my number 10 wrenches don’t get gone because when I’ve got that idea, right, I’m excited to work. I don’t want to search for which tool to use, I just want to get amazing things done. Yeah. It’s the epitome of context switching, right? You have knowledge workers that are trying to develop a product, and they’re being dragged down by not being able to find the 10 millimeter wrench. It’s the smallest of things that distract them, right? So that’s a great example.
Integration with Different Tools
So, now one of the biggest concerns we hear from clients is about integration with a lot of their different tools. So how do the managed services how does the managed service work we do with existing tools and systems that engineering teams are using, and what are the key considerations that you need to take into account to ensure seamless integration with different tools?
Identifying the Business Need
Oh, that’s a long and great question. All right. I think the first thing to consider is business requirements, right? We all do it, and we sort of do it intuitively or intrinsically or accidentally, but somewhere in there is every single time we’re going through, let’s use this example of making a list of all the tools you have in your toolbox, right? Inevitably, you’re going to find, hey, we have two electrical engineering tools, which are these, and we’re going to have multiples of that tool. We’re gonna have multiples of that tool, and you need to sit down with the engineers and talk about what the business goal here is. What is the business need? Hey, this one is really good at doing PCB layout. This one is really doing at FPGA, which is completely separate, right? They’re just in the same category.
I think a lot of that is sort of this broad domain knowledge right that sometimes we forget in our world where the we have these specialist employees these brilliant people who are great at doing one thing or two things or five things or or even 10 things but don’t know about the other 90 things that the business needs to run right and therefore we rely on our what do you call it when the the spot where all the departments merge all the way at the top of the company. Go to the CEO to come back and say, hey this is not great. These two are not great for integration, maybe we should or should not do that.
Should You Integrate?
That is a spot where you have to consider hey let’s define these requirements get it on the same level get on a common playing field of here are business requirements and and bluntly costs and benefits so that we can evaluate the best way I guess it didn’t ask how to integrate it I’m just asking like should we integrate these different should we keep using them now and I think that’s important for this conversation right like “should we” should probably be the first question before the “can we” or “what are the ways to do it” but the “should we” is that something we should do.
Industry Changes & Digital Transformation
I want to shift just a little bit. The engineering industry is changing a lot. I mean, there are so many things that are impacting engineering and product teams’ digital transformation, remote work, AI, connected product development; they all have new demands and are asking engineering teams to do different things. So, in what ways have our managed services evolved to be able to meet those changing needs?
Becoming Digital due to the Pandemic
I think a big change has been, can we talk is now a good time to talk about digital transformation, right? Like that has been a big change in the past five years, right? 2020 was a very key year here where people became remote right just one day in March everyone became very remote and we all panicked. I don’t know if we all panicked, but a lot of us panicked and… no we all panicked, everybody panicked and digitized their workflows right? Like you said in the past, during one of your blog posts, they scanned all of their Word documents, they made all their documents into Word documents, and we started shipping them around by email, and that is not digital transformation, that is a paper process with extra steps.
Mistakes to Avoid
So I think it’s really important right I think it’s a huge efficiency gain and advantage to do digital transformation. This means, as we were just talking about, integrating the tools correctly. For example, I’m taking it from this tool, putting it on my desktop, putting it on a USB drive, uploading it into that tool, right? That is really just a different form of, I printed it out, I walked it over to the accounting department, and I handed it to them.
Those are, you know, at best, those are just spots where you can save a little bit of time, and at worst, those are spots where mistakes or errors are going to slip in. Where a paper will get lost, a file will get lost, a PDF will be the wrong revision, and go out to the manufacturing facility, and get imported into MES. And oops, it came back as meters instead of millimeters. That’s a tragedy. Yeah, that’s like the worst possible outcome, right? The wrong drawing made it to manufacturing. But it’s a real thing, right? Like being able to change your workflows and systems to map and make sure that those human errors can never happen is really important.
Closing Remarks
Ed, thank you for sharing those details and stories today. I really appreciate that. That’s fantastic. If you’re an engineering leader, CAD administrator, or member of a product development team, we’re here to help you scale your engineering projects, improve collaboration, and accelerate your time to market. That’s what we’ve been doing, partnering with companies for over 20 years. And, our goal ultimately we help companies get their product to market more quickly by helping manage their engineering ecosystems through managed services. We do that by being a trusted partner in different product spaces like medical devices, automotive, aerospace, and high-tech industries.
So to learn more about what we do, visit our website spkaa.com or reach out to our consultants for a free expert review of your engineering needs. Thanks for watching. Ed, thank you for your time again, and we’ll see you next time.
