Community Forum – Combining Engineering Functions

How do you combine a series of relatively small engineering organizations supporting similar product lines in local markets into a cohesive, dynamic team serving the global market?

We are a series of small engineering / R&D groups located in several countries (North America, Europe and Asia) that have unit recently worked in a divisional structure.

Our goal is to create a single global engineering department that consolidates the various R&D, product development, and field application  groups to take advantage of best practices, local resources and expertise from the existing groups within  a single structure.

We are interested in how other organizations may have accomplished a similar restructuring, best practices and any potential sources of information to support this integration effort. – Glen Appleby, Manager – Engineering, Portec Rail Products Ltd.

Community Responses

Rick Pearce, IRI Emeritus Member
Some thoughts from my own experience with this exact issue:

Begin by being sure that everyone in an influential position is absolutely clear on the reasons for making this change, and buys into it.  This sounds obvious, but it can be extremely elusive to achieve.

Be sure you have strong support from the top, preferably the CEO – not just tacit approval, but passionate, committed resolve to make this happen.  Ideally, it will have been conceived and initiated by him/her, and not bubbled up from within the engineering organization.  If the organization has a history of decentralized, autonomous, local country management, there may be powerful inertia resisting such a perceived threat to local executives’ fiefdoms.  The company’s administrative systems, from financial, to human resources, to legal, etc., may have evolved along very different lines in different countries.  This may require uncomfortable change for many functions that seem unrelated to engineering.  Only determined and sustained leadership from the highest levels can overcome this.

Don’t forget that there most likely are legitimate differences in customer or market needs in different areas of the world.  In centralizing the engineering function, be sure to allow mechanisms for serving those specific needs when they diverge from the integrated global view.  For example, in one country your application engineers may be expected to make modifications to products at a customer site, whereas in another, only unionized technicians may be allowed to do this.  Or, perhaps rail gauge, duty cycle, power requirements or local regulations preclude the use of an identical product in different areas.  Don’t try to force fit uniformity heavy-handedly.

The mix of company culture and organization structure will greatly impact success.  If the company has a history of international collaboration among the engineering (and other) functions, and some degree of centralized reporting, the task will be simplified somewhat.  If the opposite is true, it will be a difficult task, probably requiring a multi-year effort before you’ll be able to see real benefits.  Once you have rolled this plan out, the antibodies will probably rise to resist it.  So, be sure you’ve taken the time up front to define “success” and convince the players – especially yourself – that the desired outcome fits with the way your company really operates or, at the least, that it’s within the company’s capacity and willingness to change.  Patience and persistence will be your biggest assets.

John Blair, IRI Emeritus Member
I suggest you consider a matrix organization for projects, if not already using one, where the project lead be given to the local engineering organization familiar with local needs, regulations, and markets, and the functional inputs be drawn from expertise in part resident locally, and in part resident in sister organizations at the different locations, if not available locally. If a specific expertise is not available within the company, that part of the project is contracted out by the project lead.

This model is used widely in cooperative product development, both in defense and private sector industries, working with a variety of geographically distributed players. Various well proven management tools are available to aid monitoring, coordinating, and managing the activity.

I would be pleased to discuss further.

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