It's a Virtual Money Saver

Engineers design to see results fast
BY JOSEPH SERWACH

Stephen Kennel's employees wear two hats, serving as designers and engineers - a combination he says saves customers time and money.

"We probably save them 50 percent of the time and typically more," said Kennel, president of Plymouth-based Virtual Engineering Inc. "The biggest problem we have is fitting into a conventional program."

Sitting at a computer screen in the Plymouth offices, one of Kennel's workers finishes a design for what eventually will be the front facade of a next-generation personal computer due out on the market in the fall. The project will take just 10 weeks to go from concept to production tooling.

Nearby, senior project engineer David Pawczuk designs a car-seat mechanism, saying his job is more satisfying, less frustrating, easier to do quickly and more fun because he's empowered to do design and engineering work together.

"I've done it the other way," said Pawczuk, who started his career as a designer and later went on to get an engineering degree. "It is easier to sit down and prove it to myself and then actually carry it out. It's a far superior way to do engineering."

Kennel said having an engineer do the engineering for a job while being a designer is getting more common in many industries, but he said his methods have had a hard time catching on in the auto industry, where some traditions die hard.

But as automakers continue to out-source work to suppliers and smaller companies, and those small companies take on new responsibilities, they are finding the need to attract more white-collar professionals such as engineers.

Enter the large number of small engineering companies clustered in the Plvmouth area, most based here to have easy access to the brain power in Ann Arbor as well as the big companies in Dearborn, Detroit and Auburn Hills.
In just four years, Virtual has started from scratch and grown to a $2.5 million in sales with 22 people in offices in Plymouth and Grand Rapids. The company is also planning to open new offices in Cleveland and Chicago.

"The key has been hiring overqualified people able to do more than the customer expected," Kennel said. "We also give our quotes based on a fixed cost, giving us an incentive to do it right and quickly."

Kennel also has been involved with RustNet" an area Internet provider, and has found the new technology helpful in engineering. In one case, he had engineers working with a customer in Australia simultaneously over their computers to get a job done with people on two continents working as if they were in the same room.

Increasingly, college and university engineering programs are teaching engineers more about design and other aspects of production. At the University of Michigan, the business and engineering departments have joined forces for courses combining design, engineering, marketing and management, while Oakland University's engineering department is working directly with industry leaders to design courses fitting their latest needs.

But Ned Nielsen, an engineering professor at Calvin College who spent 28 years as an engineer in the Detroit area as well as Grand Rapids, offered some doubts about combining the two roles.

"On a small project, that might work; but on a larger project, that seems like it would bog it down," Nielson said of having engineers design projects. "When you have an engineer and designer working together, it's like having 2-1/2 people. With two people, you bounce off your ideas, and he bounces off his, and you come up with something neither one would have thought of.

"Designers and engineers have different perspectives, and in some regards, they provide a check and a balance for each other."

However, Mick Anderson, sales manager for Rockford, III.-based Modern Metal Product Co., said Virtual helped save Modern's role as a supplier for the Big Three. As the auto giants phased out suppliers that weren't full-service providers, pairing up with Virtual made the latch-maker a full-service company that is once again seeing its business grow, he said.

Competitor Bill McManus, business director for Walled Lakebased Sundberg-Ferrar Inc., said his 62-year-old company started using the same Pro-Engineer software as Virtual uses about five years ago and has seen dramatic results.

"What they're doing and what we're doing is we're putting engineers who are designers directly on the tube to get solutions faster," McManus said. "Our customers are experiencing great success." CDB