R&D vs fabrication

[TiberiusB]

I think our VAS still doesn't reflect this distinction very clearly, and users get confused.

We have separated Non-production (office work, etc) from Design, and from another category that we call R&D, but which is still confusing.

In a past discussion I proposed to clearly separate R&D, which is building new understanding or knowledge, from the act of making or fabricating something. I proposed to limit the output of R&D ONLY to a publication, which is a study.

Sometimes, during an R&D project we end up making a prototype. But this is NOT the value that should be tracked related to the R&D activity. The value created by R&D is the new understanding, the new knowledge created, which is not a material thing, and lives in a document somewhere. If a prototype is created for proof of concept, we can think of that as two processes running in parallel, one being the new knowledge development and the other one being a fabrication process. Yes, they can be intimately intertwined, but if we treat them as a single process I think that we add confusion to the VAS.

The output of a fabrication process is a material thing, that we want to know where it is, how much it costed, how many were made. The system should decouple knowledge from material resources.

Moreover, soon we'll also perform manufacturing activities, and using a Labnote to capture that will not be appropriate. So we need another tool to keep track of fabrication/manufacturing activities anyway.

I propose to create another form for fabrication/manufacturing.

[fosterlynn]

We figured we would eventually need something else for fabricationmanufacturing. Tibi can you mock up what that should look like in your situation? (Any medium is fine, keep it simple.)

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 2:03 PM, TiberiusB notifications@github.com wrote:

I think our VAS still doesn't reflect this distinction very clearly, and user get confused.

We have separated Non-production (office work, etc) from Design, and from another category that we call R&D, but which is still confusing.

In a past discussion I proposed to clearly separate R&D, which is building new understanding or knowledge, from the act of making or fabricating something. I proposed to limit the output of R&D ONLY to a publication, which is a study.

Sometimes, during an R&D project we end up making a prototype. But this is NOT the value that should be tracked related to the R&D activity. The value created by R&D is the new understanding, the new knowledge created, which is not a material thing, and lives in a document somewhere. If a prototype is created for proof of concept, we can think of that as two processes running in parallel, one being the new knowledge development and the other one being a fabrication process. Yes, they can be intimately intertwined, but if we treat them as a single process I think that we add confusion to the VAS.

The output of a fabrication process is a material thing, that we want to know where it is, how much it costed, how many were made. The system should decouple knowledge from material resources.

Moreover, soon we'll also perform manufacturing activities, and using a Labnote to capture that will not be appropriate. So we need another tool to keep track of fabrication/manufacturing activities anyway.

I propose to create another form for fabrication/manufacturing.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/issues/84 .

[bhaugen]

Manufacturing tends to want to be a minimum data entry environment. It's possible to accomplish in several ways. I'll outline one: backflushing.

Backflushing means that all the system needs to know is how many of an end product you produced. It can figure out from there what else needed to have happened in terms of work, consumption, use, and citations, through multiple levels of the product structure, and automatically generate all of the supporting events.

So, basically, all that needs to be logged is end product production.

To make this work, you need tight recipes and predictable processes.

Even if you don't, we could imagine several intermediate stages where a lot of logging information could be automatically generated with some gaps, leaving people to fill in the gaps and exceptions.

[fdurville]

Manufacturing is certainly very different from R&D.

I agree that the result (or output) of R&D is mostly knowledge, typically summarized in a publication or report of some kind (written document or video). As Tibi said, sometimes a prototype is built during R&D, but it is NOT the real value of the R&D work.

But there is also Engineering, which could be considered as a cross between R&D and Manufacturing.

During Engineering effort, oftentimes a working demo prototype is built. This prototype is sometimes turned into a product. The output of Engineering is typically a design or process that will be used for manufacturing a product.

Quite often, specially in small companies, Engineering does not exist as a separate entity, as it is usually integrated with either R&D or Manufacturing / Production.

[TiberiusB]

I agree with this in-between that Frederic identified. We do have these deliverables in the system already -

• Documented idea,
• Design and Prototype
• Product. they map respectively into
• R&D,
• Engineering
• Production.

But we don't have type of work: Engineering.

We should probably expand type of work to map deliverables.

For Type of work now we have:

• R&D work
• Design work,
• Manufacturing work
• Non-production work

We use Design work as 3D design and electronics design, and this work produces a virtual representation of a product. It does not include a prototype. We could include Prototyping, which would create a physical thing.

Frederic put Design and Prototyping under Engineering. Should we replace Design work by Engineering work that would have as deliverable a virtual representation something and/or the physical prototype of the same thing?

[TiberiusB]

I also propose to restrict the output of R&D to only

• Documented idea,
• Documented process
• Publication.

At this moment, if I want to create an output from a lab note I am not limited to these 3 options. This makes logging more difficult, because the user is presented with a large list of other things. Moreover, I think it is better to have R&D only associated with this 3 types of resources, otherwise we create non-consistent data in the system.

Likewise, I would limit output of manufacturing to Product.

If we include Engineering I would limit it only to

• Design
• Prototype