The biggest challenges facing power engineers

15th February 2018

Vicor UK

Alice Matthews

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Whitepaper

Today, engineers are asked to find creative solutions to deliver more power from less space and with higher efficiencies. This makes power-system design an increasingly important part of developing technologically-advanced electronic equipment. Research by Vicor found that these engineers are facing a myriad of challenges meeting cost and schedule targets.

The research found that power-system developers around the globe perceive the biggest challenge to be changes in specifications for the power system during development. Although it may be surprising that this was the biggest problem, rather than technical challenges associated with meeting the system’s requirements, in fact changing specifications make it even harder to deliver a project on time and on budget.

The challenge of changing specifications
Changes to specifications during development was the biggest issue that power-system designers surveyed must overcome, with almost all (87%) struggling to deal with this challenge. Changes in specifications mean project delays and increased cost due to the additional work required to modify the design to meet the new requirements.

It’s clear that these changes do have a major impact on projects, as most of those surveyed (65%) said that changes to product specification are a major contributor to delays in power-system development. Although two thirds of power engineers already see the negative impact of changes on their projects, the problem is likely to get worse as the majority (67%) believed that changes were becoming more common.

The impact of these changes can be dramatic. Almost all (80%) engineers surveyed are struggling to meet project time scales, with a similar number (79%) seeing the time given to each project reducing, and three quarters (72%) having to increase the rate of innovation due to shorter product life cycles. The changes to specifications can only increase the time pressure.

Delayed projects can have a large financial impact. To put it into perspective, take an example of an application that an OEM’s business projections show as starting to pay back within two years of the new system’s five year product life. The project development in this example takes eight months. If there is even just a two-month delay, the return could reduce by as much as 20%. For a development of $1m the loss of contribution could exceed $350,000 when one takes into account the reduced product life, as well as the increase in associated development costs.

Find out more in the whitepaper below.