Rb1957 hit the nail on the head. Isn’t democracy and design by committee a wonderful thing, nobody has to be responsible for anything. In the good old days, a good design engineer, manufacturing engineer and/or lead designer did the matrix thing in their heads, whatever their biases and knowledge and experience level, etc. Hopefully, they got together and compared their notes and the boss made a decision based on the sum of that knowledge. The more formal matrix has the potential of being somewhat less biased by one person or element or another, but now the full time job becomes continuously monitoring and adjusting the multiplier factors, based on real good experience of all of the factors, and not being biased as you do this, and it probably should still involve the same committee as above. That’s your job in making the matrix work for you.
The problem as I see it today (and this is an older guy’s perspective, maybe more experienced and knowledgeable about some things ) is that we have way to many inexperienced people doing way to many independent little parts of the total, with insufficient guidance or knowledge of the whole machine; then this is all thrown in a blender and out pops the finished part. Actually, the camel is not a bad horse, particularly in the desert where water is in short supply and their larger hoofs deal better with the dry sand and poor footing. That design committee didn’t do too bad a job. But today, we have inexperience people using CAD who really couldn’t do drafting otherwise. It must be right if you can do it in CAD, right? No knowledge of the real facts required. We have inexperience people using modeling software and FEM and FEA who couldn’t take a first shot at a simple beam design without this software. They don’t even know that they are modeling it wrong, after all the program spit out results to 12 signif. places, that must be really really right. Then many companies have nobody with the knowledge, experience and overview ability to guide this whole process.
This is a fundamental problem (flaw) with the direction engineering and design is going these days, and I don’t think there is a big enough column (definable element) in your matrix, or enough multipliers and adjustment factors to account for this deficiency/problem. All of these new tools and methods have the potential of being improvements in the way we do things, and the way we can finesse designs and analyses today, but we are not combining and using them correctly. They will not take the place of real experience and product knowledge, not in my lifetime, and companies are making a big mistake thinking otherwise.
