Online engineering
Rockwell Collins nipped wasteful product development in the bud by training engineers to catch design flaws before the testers did.
Problem: Costly mistakes in product engineering and design are driving your company's balance sheet perilously into the red zone.
Solution: Let your engineers get their hands dirty before flawed products make it to market.
Rockwell Collins used to throw money away. Its engineers wasted tens of millions of dollars designing flight-deck instruments that failed electromagnetic interference (EMI) tests. When the strong electronic emissions jammed airplanes' navigational equipment, the team had to scrap product designs and go back to the drawing board.
Rockwell engineers had to learn to catch EMI flaws before they got to the test stage, says Cliff Purington, manager of learning and development. But the company couldn't just send its engineers back to school. Nowadays, a radio frequency problem like EMI is something of an anachronism. Few universities offer courses in how to prevent it. To avert these failures, Rockwell would have to school the engineers itself.
But engineers are a tricky group to train, especially via the Net. The complex procedures they need to know demand hands-on demonstration. In the past Rockwell always trained its engineers in person. The company figured that it could train 180 people per year in EMI by flying them to the firm's headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from outposts such as Portland, Dallas, and Melbourne, Florida. But at that rate, Purington says, it would have taken 14 years to reach all 2,500 of the engineers who needed the EMI training. Rockwell couldn't wait that long.
So with the help of e-learning developer Mentergy, the company created a computer-based course to walk its engineers through the process of preventing EMI in their designs. Because the courses required audio, video, and graphics to do the job, it made the most sense to create them on CD-ROM. And engineers had to be able to take the course wherever they wereâ€"in the office, at home, or on the roadâ€"and to pass it around to colleagues.
Application engineer John Gilbertson says he likes the way the electronic EMI course let him learn at his own pace. "I could sit down when my time permitted and go through the sections that I wanted to and skip other sections," he says. Afterward, Gilbertson applied what he learned by customising the computer-aided design tool that Rockwell's circuit-board engineers use. Now they "don't have to remember everything about every little signal on a board," he says.
Since the EMI program was created last April, about 500 engineers have completed the course. As a result, Purington says, the company catches EMI design flaws before products go to the testing stage. Now he plans to put the course on the company's intranet, which will let him track which employees take it and how they do. It also makes the course more widely available among Rockwell engineers.
Rockwell spent $250,000 to develop the EMI course, but not all e-learning solutions require huge cash outlays. In 2000, Purington slashed his department's multimillion-dollar budget by 34 percent. Even with less money, Purington delivers 40 percent more courses than beforeâ€"more than 350 to date. Rockwell also uses course-design software from Centra, which combines slide presentations and audio. During live classes, employees can raise a virtual hand with a mouse click, and ask and answer questions with live audio or instant messages.
Engineersâ€"which total 40 percent of Rockwell's workforceâ€"look for learning opportunities "just to maintain their proficiencies and their own personal competitive position," Purington says. And Rockwell doesn't want them looking outside the company. If they quit, "it costs one-and-a-half times what you're currently paying an engineer to get a new one," says Purington.
