Making the transition from designing mechanically-oriented products to smart, connected ones can be intimidating. And frankly, it should be. Companies making this ambitious change must gain new competencies to develop embedded software, design electronics, and plan electrical systems. All three are brand new domains that might seem pretty foreign to companies that have been focused on mechanical design for decades.

While companies do, in fact, need to gain those new capabilities, they often overlook an additional adjustment: changing the way mechanical engineers design. You see, decisions made in mechanical design have a profound impact on all those other engineering disciplines.

Delving deeper into the changes to mechanical design in the smart, connected products era is the focus of this post. Let’s get started.