Please excuse the provocative title, I had to get you to click on it. But I promise by the end you will agree with me.

Why I Ask Business Questions

I've noticed a pattern in at least five conversations I've had recently. Someone who thinks of me as an engineer / "technical guy", asks me an engineering question, and seems surprised, sometimes even put off, by my response.

I think I've figured out why...

Suppose I'm touring a factory and someone asks what I would do to improve it. Since I'm a "technical guy," I suspect they're expecting me to talk about the equipment. Maybe suggest a robot to automate something, or software to improve inventory tracking.

Instead, I usually start asking questions about the business and how it is managed.

What's your on-time delivery rate? How do you decide what gets produced each day? Who's responsible for making those decisions? How do the people on the factory floor know what they should be working on? How does management/ownership decide what to invest in?

These aren't the questions people expect from an engineer. And I can see why they might be put off by them.

When someone shows you the factory they've spent years building, and your first question is essentially "How do you know your employees are doing the right things?", it's not hard to imagine how that might come across.

My cousin/co-founder Jacob has watched in horror as I've gone down this line of questioning several times. He thinks it's a less-than-ideal way to make friends. And he's usually right.

His argument is, people don't particularly enjoy being interrogated about how they run their company, especially by some young engineer who has probably read too many books about Lean Manufacturing and now thinks he knows how to run their business better than they do.

Fair enough.

The trouble is that I'm not asking these questions because I think I know how to run their business better than they do. I am confident I do not.

I'm asking because I don't know how to help improve their factory without understanding their business.

The Problem With Engineering in Isolation

Suppose I spend a week studying a factory and discover that I can design a machine that doubles the output of one of its production lines.

Is that good engineering?

It depends.

If the company can't sell the additional output, I've probably accomplished very little. If the machine requires more capital than the additional production can justify, I may have made the business worse. And if the real problem is that orders are late because of ambiguity on what should be produced next, I may have solved the wrong problem entirely.

None of these are engineering failures in the traditional sense. The machine might work perfectly.

But I would have a hard time calling it a successful engineering project.

Sometimes the Best Solution Isn't a Machine

There's another reason I ask these questions. Sometimes the best solution to a manufacturing problem doesn't involve machinery or technology at all.

Suppose a factory loses several hours of production each week changing a machine over from one product to another. One solution might be to purchase a newer, more automated machine that can change between products faster.

Another might be to approach the changeover the way a Formula 1 pit crew approaches a pit stop: organize the tools and materials ahead of time, give each team member a clearly defined role, and have everything in place before the machine stops running. Then the change over might only take a few minutes. In lean manufacturing this is called SMED.

Both might solve the same problem.

But one could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months to implement. The other might cost a few hundred dollars and take a few days to iron out.

Of course, there are situations where the new machine is justified. That's precisely the point. Until I understand the business and how it operates, it's hard to say which solution is better.

I've increasingly come to believe that the business context doesn't just determine whether an engineering solution is economically viable. It determines what a good engineering solution is in the first place.

I didn't always think this way. It's something I learned, rather expensively, while building KLAW Industries.