Therefore it is not surprising that when companies are looking to streamline their operation that the Design Office is one of the first departments to come under the spotlight as an area for improvement. The great news is that there are several positive steps you can take to ensure that the Design Office is as efficient as it can be.

The obvious starting point is the CAD workstations. As a rough guide, if the equipment you are using is over 3 years old the chances are it will need replacing. No doubt this equipment would have been state of the art 3 years ago, but such is the pace of development within the computer industry that it is not unusual for machines to become obsolete in a relatively short space of time. Older equipment that is slow and unreliable is no longer an asset but a liability; costing the company on a day-to-day basis through downtime, missed deadlines, high support and repair costs relative to the residual value of the workstations,

and frustrated Design Engineers as they struggle with slow systems.All this is merely adding to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the systems.

The TCO of a workstation is the total amount of money required to keep that workstation operating throughout its expected life. This is not just simply the cost of supporting the workstation and software, but how it's reliability and performance (or lack of it) will impact on the profitability of the company. When a workstation is in such a critical role as the Design Department, the cost of an inoperative, slow or unreliable system can soon rack up. As a simplified example, if a workstation is down for just one day, an engineer is being paid to sit idle whilst his workstation is being repaired. Moreover, it could result in delays on the project being worked on or the project being rushed to meet deadline dates.