Who implements ECO changes on engineering drawings? 2

[fogleghorn]

Our company no longer has "draftsmen" in the Engineering Department. Our company uses Solid Edge to create mechanical component drawings, electromechanical assembly drawings, and cable drawings. Anyone in the company can write an ECO and and submit hand marked-up drawings to illustrate the changes that they would like to see on a drawing. Engineers review the ECOs, and then if the engineer approves of the changes, the ECO goes to the ECO committee. If the ECO is approved by the ECO Committee, then the changes to the Engineering Drawings have to be implemented by the Mechanical Engineering Department (like I said earlier, there are no more draftsmen). It is important to note that our assembly drawings also serve as Manufacturing Instructions, at least for the time being. How are other companies handling this situation, or are other companies still keeping some draftsmen around?

 

[CheckerHater]

It doesn’t really matter as long as you have some procedure/policy in place.

The common guidelines are like follows:
1) ECO may be originated by any person in the company
2) ECO should be approved by major parties involved:
a) Engineering/Design
b) Manufacturing
c) Quality
But also sometimes:
d) Purchasing (if new components to be bought)
e) Marketing (If new sales brochures to be made)
f) Etc., etc.

3) Actual design changes have to be routed thru Engineering/Design only; as they are the only ones in charge of original design/any design.
After that it really doesn’t matter who personally will operate the computer.

Or did you ask about something else?

 

[KENAT]

Around here we don't have any designers/drafters either though sometimes junior staff/interns get assigned a lot of the small changes. A lot of the revisions actually get incorporated by manufacturing engineers - not necessarily my favorite but then our doc control is a bit weak full stop.

Do I smell a hint of "I'm and Engineer, I'm too good to make drawing changes"? My view point on this as well as drafting generally is if the job requires it then do it - or else find another job.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[fogleghorn]

There is a big push right now to keep engineers focused on new product development. Therefore, if engineers have to spend time each week revising drawings for existing products they are being distracted from there main priority, which is new product designs and new product documentation. I don't believe that the engineers have any problems with creating 2D drawings or revising 2D drawings, but revising 2D drawings for existing products does take them away from there main priority. We are also moving away from having our assembly drawings serve as the Manufacturing Instructions; I believe this will cut down on the number of ECOs that Engineering will see in the future due to the fact that a lot of process notes and changes will now be handled by Manufacturing Instructions which will be created and maintained by Manufacturing Engineering.

 

[CheckerHater]

Sometimes revising old drawings helps to learn about mistakes you don’t want to make in new ones…

 

[KENAT]

fogleghorn I'd forgotten about your push to concentrate on only new product development so I was wrong in my comment.

Although we let our manufacturing engineers make changes I'm not convinced it's a good thing because they don't always look at proposed changes from a function point of view and they are pushed to spend the minimum time and seem more willing to sacrifice quality of the drawings to do so than we are in dev eng.

Checkehater also makes a good point about learning from your mistakes.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[Nella95]

In times like these I do whatever for whomever - as long as I'm not doing someone else's job.

 

[CheckerHater]

Should you let someone else do your job?

 

[Nella95]

me? If I couldn't handle it, but I was hired to be able to do it.

SW Professional 2012
64 bit SP1.0
Intel Xeon X(R) CPU 1603 0 @ 2.80 GHz
8.0 GB of RAM

 

[dgallup]

If the change involves geometry I like to make the drawing change myself before the approval stage. Frequently someone will mark up a drawing to change one value not realizing that when the geometry regenerates it will force the change of a couple more things. I always make the changes myself during the development phase of a new product. However, I do let most of the production drawing changes go to our lone draftsperson as most of them just involve rewording a note or adding another line to a table. Our manufacturing engineers could not make a drawing change if their life depended on it.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[CheckerHater]

Very good point dgallup.
I will not trust anyone with my precious 3D data.

But CAD aside, Engineering should always maintain firm grip on everything, well, engineering, be it new design or changes.
Loosen it, and soon everybody and his uncle will be releasing ECOs, but guess what? Engineers will be the ones to blame if anything goes wrong. Just trust me on that. :-(
Nobody looks at the initials in revision column, but the name in titleblock.

 

[MikeHalloran]

One reason that I don't like manufacturing engineers, or anyone else, making decisions about revisions to a product is that the CAD model does not capture the WHY behind certain features. ... and there are often good commercial reasons for not letting everyone in the company have access to that WHY stuff. In particular, salesmen, who tend to defect to competitors when they get fired.

I have gone so far as to allow people to think that a particular product feature existed for a reason that was actually bogus if you looked at the underlying physics. ... but the feature was necessary to sort of debottleneck a completely different product function.
I believe that the product feature has been mostly removed since my departure, but its absence has not _yet_ caused a substantial volume of lawsuits. I'm expecting a call, eventually.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[fogleghorn]

We use Solid Edge now, but back during our Cadkey days, the mechanical engineers would finish their designs, then turn their assembly models over to drafting to make the hybrid exploded assembly drawings that would be used by manufacturing and service. Once the draftsmen got a hold of the 3D assembly model they would start moving models around in 3D space to get the exploded view that they were looking for. So the next time that a mechanical engineer went back to look at his 3D assembly model, it would be totally scrambled. It was so frustrating; and since the top dog in engineering didn't have a background in mechanical engineering or any CAD experience, he didn't care what the 3D assembly model looked like as long as the assembly drawings got done and released. With the newer mechanical CAD systems (i.e. Solid Edge, Soildworks), I think this is less of a problem. I know with Solid Edge there is an Exploded/Render/Animate mode, where you can explode assemblies and save the configurations, while your design model stays constrained.