How much of your day is spent adding engineering value to your development projects? Think about it for a minute. All that email. That huge list of issues you track in a spreadsheet. Running across the office with those forms because you heard the engineering director finally came out of that meeting. Let's face it, there's a lot of non-value added work that goes on every day in the engineering office.

This article reviews the 'Get It Right the First Time' principle, where better upfront design work allows companies to avoid late disruptive problems.

Regardless of what word you use to describe it, engineering a new product often involves the development of new systems, materials, components or any number of other new items. Any new item will have a number of issues that, if left unresolved, will cause product level issues. And despite analysis, testing, qualification or any other type of procedure, some amount of product issues will be unresolved beyond design release. From there, they proceed downstream in the product development process.