ABSTRACT
The role of engineering in a manufacturing organization is both to design new products and to work on engineering changes necessitated by manufacturing or customer needs. These needs could be marketing requests, quality problems, manufacturing problems, vendor problems, or tasks to reduce costs. It is not easy to prioritize all these support needs and still have time to design new products. If the department is large enough, my recommendation is to divide the department between new product design and sustaining engineering, with each having separate budgets. After that, the new product design function will prioritize which new design to work on, and the sustaining engineering function will prioritize which needs to fulfill first. Engineers and support personnel would be permanently assigned to each function, with some overlap in specialized fields.
