Tinker Toy Lab

This week in class we received an assignment to a certain part of a company (e.g. manufacturing, engineering, marketing, suppliers, etc.). Ultimately, two companies were created with one in the bigger room and one in the smaller conference room. I was out in the bigger room where the company functioned more like a bunch of smaller companies.

As a company, we had to receive information from the customers about what they were looking for and then communicate that to our engineers who would make a detailed engineering drawing to give to manufacturing (me) who would then send it over to the suppliers. From the very beginning, we were in trouble. Our marketers did not get a very clear message from the customers and told us that we were creating something with wheels that rolled. Our engineers struggled to come up with an engineering drawing (what they did produce was a 2d stick figure car) and to figure out which materials they needed, which slowed the process down. Unfortunately, instead of helping them, most of us just pressured them to move faster and then proceeded to stare into space and wait for them to finish.

When the drawings and supplies finally got to our suppliers, we ran into more hurdles because accounting and the suppliers could not agree on a price. We spent at least 40 minutes just talking with the suppliers before we realized that there were other suppliers we could talk to. Finally, we got the parts to manufacturing (me), but the parts seemed pretty random and we didn't even have 4 wheels. After more negotiations (we got 4 wheels!), we had about 5 minutes to assemble and test our device. Naturally, 5 minutes was not enough time for quality to go over all the issues with it and we definitely made a lower quality product than our competitors.

What I learned from this exercise is to be wary in larger companies of splitting responsibilities into different departments. It probably works better in real life because there are multiple projects, so a department is always working on something, but in our simulation, there was so much wasted time where multiple departments were stalled waiting for another one. This also caused some departments to be resentful of the other ones and instead of helping, they just became more impatient.

The other team was much more successful because their departments worked together to help each other fulfill the requirements. Their suppliers also were more reasonable about costs. Overall, their culture was very different and they saw each other as one entity instead of competing roles. I will try to remember to foster a strong culture and make communication a priority when working on projects in large groups.

Picture of our final prototype: