In Stay Sharp Episode 144, The Hidden Costs of Digital Engineering Systems, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott talk with Razorleaf colleague Eric Smith, one of Razorleaf’s original employees and current VP of Services. Together, they dig into the unanticipated price you might pay for your new enterprise system, from maintenance to training and beyond.
What’s Hiding in the Spaghetti
Eric makes the point that most of these are costs you can’t predict or can’t know about as you’re going into an implementation. His list starts with day-to-day support aspects, whether that’s user support or how systems interact, break, get fixed, or get upgraded. “When we first started, you’d go install a system and it was a server. That was all you had to work with. And now, environments have become much more complicated. You have a ton of interrelated systems,” he explains. “It’s really become an interoperability spaghetti-pile of systems that then have to be coordinated and dealt with.” A lot of that spaghetti requires different expertise, which probably means different experts, which means more cost.
Eric Smith, VP of Services, Razorleaf
Whether it’s part of the problem or a result of it, one of the challenges is when a new technology system is categorized as an IT cost but then becomes a more nuanced conversation. Jonathan notes that’s especially true because different experts, stakeholders, or contributors also come with a cost. “They needed somebody in the business to do some of the work. They needed the engineers to talk about the design process. They needed the manufacturing engineers to talk about how we do this on the shop floor, how we get work instructions out to people, what do those packets look like?” None of that happens for free.
Another piece of the puzzle is who manages the systems. Some companies end up with engineering IT services that are separate from regular IT, which can cause both confusion and churn. There’s a lot more than you’d expect involved in sustaining these technologies, and that can be where lines of responsibility get blurred. Eric says, “If you need to update something, a piece of code changes, or you need to make a change somewhere, how that functions is probably going to be a subject matter expert from the department that’s impacted. Or maybe somebody outside that you have to work with.”
Sustainment only gets harder as platforms get more complex, Jonathan adds, such as platforms moving toward a microservices architecture. “There isn’t one database, there’re actually four databases. This database serves the authentication microservice, this database serves the index service that’s for all the searching that you do, and this other database serves the data store and the vaulting that happens—and, and, and,” he says. “All these may end up living on different servers, different networks, different places. And it explodes.” Typically, neither IT nor engineering can fully own the systems, and they have to work together.
What Else Are You Missing
Eric suggests the big cost that’s always underestimated is transition time, meaning downtime and mental capacity, because the what’s being done is high-brain-capacity work. He says, “When it’s interrupted, to re-kickstart that brain capacity, to pick back up where you are … it can take significantly more time to get back up to being efficient where you were when you were interrupted.” In fact, research shows that when deep work is interrupted, the average recovery time from the interruption to back to where you were is 23 minutes. Consider your 50 to 100 engineers being interrupted with a patch update once or twice a month, then multiply all of that by 23 minutes each. “That’s a big deal when you think about hidden costs,” Jonathan says.
Other gotchas include training, whether it’s onboarding workers to a new platform or experienced users getting used to a UI reorganization or a new feature. Organizational change management (OCM) is always the answer for smoother onboarding and successful implementations—Stay Sharp offers plenty of podcasts to prove it—and that adds more cost. In addition, Jonathan notes, everyone today wants data integrated between applications. Our increasingly complex systems—where it’s not unusual to have back-end servers each with data management tools, containers or VMs, simulation tools on top of different kinds of CAD, PDM, PLM, and on and on—make the integrations more complicated too. Manufacturers should be careful not to under-plan the resources and effort required across the board.
Learn More About Hidden Costs
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including which systems are typically managed by IT and why, how modern security requirements also add more costs to your systems, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 144: The Hidden Costs of Digital Engineering Systems and join us each week for a new podcast.
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