The push for rapid innovation is putting pressure on research and development teams. However, as the speed of innovation accelerates, R&D timelines are shrinking, creating a gap where reliability testing cannot keep pace with design speed. These unverified technologies stall at manufacturing, creating a bottleneck effect.
Adobe
Mechanical failures in manufacturing, which 41% of manufacturing companies report experiencing regularly, could be a symptom of a reliability gap in the design phase and a need for more rigorous stress testing in R&D that accounts for the increasing speed of manufacturing.
These mechanical failure disruptions cause a loss of experimentation time in the lab. Every dollar and hour spent on reactive maintenance, which 67% of companies rely on, is taken from the R&D budget, forcing teams to delay the start of the next innovation cycle to solve problems with the previous product.
The losses from downtime and repairs vastly reduce the capital that should be flowing back into the R&D cycle. The engineering downtime that occurs during repairs costs companies $50,000 per hour on average, according to SimuTech Group.
Engineering downtime from mechanical failure requires engineers to move backward, fixing broken systems rather than developing new technologies. Instead of reactive maintenance, organizations should focus on fixing the root cause of these problems before they make it to the manufacturing floor, preserving innovation momentum and reducing manufacturing downtime.
Ensuring forward movement: reliability engineering
To maintain the speed of innovation and protect the R&D budget, engineers should focus on creating reliable technologies that are thoroughly tested before being sent downstream. Integrating reliability engineering during the development and design stages could reduce later engineering downtime in manufacturing, easing the bottleneck effect.
To reclaim lost budget, leading R&D teams are using digital twin technologies to run virtual simulations that can fail without financial impact. This allows a technology to be rigorously tested before it is produced on a larger scale.
Research published in the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering found that digital twins reduce lab time and development costs by enabling virtual testing. This is supported by data from McKinsey, which reports that digital twin technology has reduced development times by up to 50% and decreased quality issues by 25%.
These simulations ensure that when a product hits the manufacturing floor, the budget flows forward toward production, not backward to repairs. By integrating reliability engineering into the design process, companies can gain a competitive advantage by reducing production costs, development time and quality issues down the line.
