Materials engineering is a powerful approach to make better products, reduce costs, and improve operational excellence. It's easier and less expensive to implement than many other approaches. It can sometimes be transformative. However, the benefits of materials engineering are missed by most companies because materials engineering expertise is missing from most companies.
Business leaders are always looking for ways to make better products and reduce costs. Common approaches include lean manufacturing, global sourcing, and factory automation. There’s another powerful approach that is often missed – materials engineering.
Materials engineering enables design and manufacturing innovations that result in better product performance and reliability, lower costs, and faster time to market.
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Any product is a collection of materials formed into components and assembled together. So, many design, manufacturing, and supplier decisions and problems involve the materials used in a product. These decisions and problems impact product performance and reliability, product costs, and the ability to meet product schedules.
Materials engineering is the only field of engineering that touches all aspects of a product’s lifecycle – product design, supplier selection, product testing, manufacturing process development, and root cause analysis of product failures and quality problems. Materials engineering offers the potential of significant improvement in operational excellence.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t have materials engineers on staff. Instead, engineers with expertise in other engineering fields make decisions and try to solve problems that involve metals.
These are skilled engineers, but they have little or no training in materials science and their expertise is not in materials selection, materials testing and analysis, and the effects of use and processing on materials properties and performance. So, materials engineering is not considered as an approach for gaining a competitive advantage.
This deficiency constrains design, manufacturing, and sourcing decisions and hampers efforts to meet product schedules, reduce costs, and quickly fix quality problems.
Impacts of materials engineering include
We work with business leaders to find new solutions to prevent product delays, reduce costs, quickly fix quality problems, and improve operational excellence. Our approach is simple to implement and doesn't require capital expenditure, training, or a culture change. The results are often transformative.
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Michael Pfeifer, Ph.D., P.E. is President of Industrial Metallurgists and a metallurgical engineering consultant with more than 30 years of experience in product design, manufacturing, failure analysis, and metallurgy training. He helps clients worldwide solve design and manufacturing problems and is the author of Materials Enabled Designs.
