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Industry meets research in practical mechatronics trainings

Interview with Adrian Rankers, trainer of mechatronics trainings
Translating academic insights in the field of mechatronics into industrial practice: that is the core of the training offered by Mechatronics Academy. Adrian Rankers, in addition to Jan van Eijk and Maarten Steinbuch co-founder of this training institute, knows what is going on in the field. He is committed to guaranteeing the best trainers, furthering the development of existing training courses and the setting up of new ones.

“The fact that I ended up in the coaching profession is actually quite logical in retrospect, because education has always attracted me,” says Adrian Rankers. “I gave tutoring as early as the age of fifteen. A few hours at first, but soon, that became more. I remember giving tutoring to the son of a top executive at Shell and quickly becoming his complete homework support. My attraction to the technical side certainly had something to do with my father. He had also studied mechanical engineering and worked, first in industry and later as a professor.”


“It is essential to realize that the students still have to go through the learning curve and that some things are quite difficult and might not be obvious to everyone. As a trainer you have to be aware of this and take the time to do so.”

After completing his mechanical engineering studies at Delft University of Technology, Rankers started his career at Philips at the Centre for Manufacturing Technology (CFT). Here he was involved in the dynamics and control techniques for CD players and wafer steppers. In the evening hours, he worked on his PhD research resulting from this work. Parts of this research were later included in the book The design of high-performance mechatronics by Rob Munnig Schmidt, Jan van Eijk, Georg Schitter and Rankers himself. In addition to the development and consultancy work and his role as group leader, he became involved in the development of mechatronics education for Philips’ own employees, initiated by Jan van Eijk. He also joined the board of the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering (DSPE) in 2008, of which he is still a member today.

Mechatronics Academy

Although he enjoyed working there in engineering and technical management, Rankers made the switch to entrepreneurship in 2010 after twenty-five years of loyal service at Philips. He wanted to focus mainly on transferring his mechatronics knowledge. This eventually led to the idea to set up the Mechatronics Academy together with Jan van Eijk and Maarten Steinbuch. It turned out that there was a need for this: the organization can now rely on sixty to seventy trainers with an industrial background in the field. Mechatronics Academy now provides training courses for around four hundred students per year. These are both open training courses and in-company training courses, specially tailored to companies.

'I like to pass on my knowledge of mechatronics to others.'

“What appeals to me in the field of mechatronics? It is always a multidisciplinary challenge where you work with people from different disciplines. Mechatronics always gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in all kinds of things. In addition, I like to pass on my knowledge of mechatronics to others,” says Rankers enthusiastically. “In doing so, it is essential to realize that the students still have to go through the learning curve that you yourself have gone through over a number of years and that some things are quite difficult and might not be obvious to everyone. As a trainer you have to have an eye for that and take your time. In accordance with the old saying by Confucius, ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand,’ we work a lot with exercises in small teams. You see how students struggle to put the theory they have just learned into practice and to master the subject matter, but it is precisely this struggle that is an important part of learning. If I can guide them through this, so that they eventually understand it for themselves, it gives me a lot of satisfaction.”

The trainings that Mechatronics Academy organizes are well-attended and get good reviews from the participants. But that certainly doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels, Rankers believes. “We think it’s important to keep our portfolio up to scratch, to expand and to ensure continuity.”

'Assignments are indispensable for understanding.'

That’s why at Mechatronics Academy they are constantly working to keep the team of trainers up to strength. Good trainers who quit, because they come of age, are replaced with a new generation. To this end, they approach the best content experts in the field, whom they know from their extensive network. They also ensure that they continually adapt existing training courses to the latest academic insights and technological developments. “We adapt existing modules and develop new ones. In addition, we invest a lot in resources that we use during the practical parts of the training courses. Practical assignments, such as working on constellations or carrying out simulations, form an essential part. These assignments are indispensable for understanding,” Ranker describes.

Mechatronics Academy offers its trainings through High Tech Institute
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New courses

In addition to keeping existing training courses up to date, Mechatronics Academy also develops new training courses that arise from a need in the market. Ideas for this come from Rankers, Van Eijk and Steinbuch themselves, but also from their trainers. At DSPE meetings or conferences in the field, everyone sticks out their feelers to know what is going on and where needs lie.

Through these practices, beautiful new training courses are created time and time again. For example, the training “Passive damping for high tech systems,” which started last year and has now run twice. In ultra-precise motion systems, dynamics – both loose and in interaction with control technology – play an important role. That is why in today’s practice, and therefore also in the various courses, much attention is paid to the realization of high eigenfrequencies in mechanics. Understanding mode shapes and the extent to which they can be excited by the actuator or perceived by the sensor is also important here. This approach is and remains essential. But with increasing accuracy requirements, this is no longer always sufficient. You then run into the limit of what is physically feasible. The deliberate addition of passive damping then offers extra solution space and becomes a decisive parameter in achieving extreme specifications.

The new training, which focuses on proven ways to achieve passive damping, is very successful, according to Rankers. It is a highly relevant theme in the precision engineering community. Hans Vermeulen, Kees Verbaan and Stan van der Meulen are the trainers. They have an enormous amount of knowledge of the field. The positive response to the training sessions is also reflected in the reactions of participants: “Excellent training,” “Excellent trainers” and “Very inspiring,” to name a few. “There is even interest in this training from abroad,” reports Rankers proudly.

Then there are a number of new training courses in development. From the training “Actuation and power electronics,” which focuses mainly on electromechanical propulsion, the idea arose to set up a training course specifically for piezo materials and their applications. There are also plans to set up a training course “Active thermal control.” Rankers: “How can you keep the temperature and deformations caused by heat sources manageable in a setup? Which control techniques can be used for this? What are suitable sensors for measuring temperatures and deformations with high precision? And which elements can be used for cooling or heating? These are all questions that will be addressed. The training course ‘Thermal effects in mechatronic systems’ has already briefly addressed this, but it is such an important theme in the world of ultra-precision that a separate training course would be appropriate here.”

“Our current training ‘Basics and design principles for ultra-clean vacuum‘ focuses on molecular contamination and how to prevent it. However, there is also a need for a new training course on ‘Particle contamination’,” continues Rankers. “In this training we will discuss particle contamination in vacuum. Unlike molecular contamination – for example by gas molecules trapped in a blind hole of a part placed in vacuum, which leak through the thread to the ultraclean vacuum – these are small pieces of material. These may be, for example, particles loosened by friction between moving parts of the device placed in vacuum. The knowledge from various studies that are already running in this area could serve as a guideline for this.”

'We continue to invest in support material for our training couses, to link the covered theory to industrial practice.'

“Together with our trainers, we are constantly working to improve training, set up new training courses and keep our pool of trainers up to standard,” Rankers summarizes. “We also continue to invest in support material for our training courses, so that we can link the theory we cover directly to industrial practice. This is where our strength lies: translating academic insights into industrial practice, so that trainees can directly deploy their knowledge in our high-tech industry. This is how we continue to keep our training package up-to-date and deliver the best trainers, so that we can continue to live up to the designation ‘excellent training’.”

This article is written by Antoinette Brugman, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Mechatronics Academy offers its trainings through High Tech Institute
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Digital business: automated at heart

Digitalization is fundamentally enabled by three core technologies: software, data and artificial intelligence. The common denominator, which is inherent in a digitalized business, is that automation is at the heart of it. Digital technologies allow for automation to a much more significant extent than traditional technologies. We see this reflected in companies: whereas in traditional companies, humans are supported with automation, in digital businesses, automation of the core business processes has removed humans from the equation (almost) entirely.

One of the key reasons for the high degree of automation is that digital businesses typically employ continuous, rather than transactional, business models. This means that there’s a continuous relationship with the business of the customers, continuous delivery of new value-adding software, data-driven insights and AI models and continuous monitoring and logging. Activities that we might accept doing manually once or twice per year rapidly become subjects for full automation if they need to be conducted monthly, weekly, daily or even more frequently.

In a digital business, all core business processes are to the highest extent automated and controlled in an automated fashion using quantitative performance data. In fact, we can conceptualize a digital business as consisting of three circles of activities. The core circle consists of the company’s core value delivery business processes. For instance, for an e-commerce website, this includes the presentation of items, recommendations, managing orders and taking payments. These activities have no human involvement and are completely automated. In the case that core value delivery processes can’t be automated fully, such as warehouse tasks, the humans tend to be instrumented with data collection and subject to the same quantitative performance management as the automated parts. The first circle is concerned with operations and activities that support operations.

The second circle of activity involves human actors who use quantitative data for analytics and experimentation. The main focus here is to measure the core business processes and to tune and optimize them. For instance, analytics may show that items that are recommended to customers by the recommendation engine are selected and bought in 0.15 percent of the cases. As the industry average is higher than that, one of the activities in this circle might then be to experiment with different recommendation algorithms using A/B testing to evaluate whether the engine’s success rate can be improved to match the average. The second circle is concerned with tactics that improve the performance of the operational core. It’s important to note that activities in this circle don’t have to be performed by humans. It’s entirely feasible to have a system run autonomous improvement activities that focus on optimizing the core business processes.

Finally, the third circle is concerned with those business activities that are strategic in nature. As strategic activities tend to be about interpreting trends and predicting the future, it can be challenging to quantify them. Typical for activities in this circle is that the focus is on the purpose of the business, the role it plays in its ecosystem and the way it seeks to differentiate and complement itself towards others.

The three circles of activities are different from each other not just in terms of automation and use of data, but also in the cycle time and operating speed. The operations circle runs, by its very nature, in seconds, minutes and hours. The tactical circle operates in days and weeks, whereas the strategic circle tends to operate in months and years.

Of course, one can find huge amounts of automation in traditional companies as well. The main difference with digital businesses is the underlying mindset and approach. A bit exaggerated, in traditional companies, tasks are performed by humans unless it’s too expensive to do so. In digital companies, tasks are automated and performed by systems unless it’s unfeasible or prohibitively expensive to do so.

It’s easy to forget how far automation and digitalization can take a company. In many SaaS companies, the vast amount of business value creation (as in 99+ percent) is conducted fully automatically by systems rather than humans. The funny thing is, however, that in my experience, even in SaaS companies, the majority of management attention is directed towards humans and human processes, even if these represent a very small slice of the business.

Concluding, I find it helpful to think about companies in three distinct circles of activity, ie delivery and operations, optimization and experimentation and, finally, strategy and innovation, that have completely different characteristics, cycle times and success metrics. In my experience, many tend to mix up the activities in the different circles, which leads to confusion and sub-par performance. As a leader, take a step back and reflect on your organization, map the processes and activities to the three circles and identify where there are mismatches that you can address. Going digital is challenging, but the alternative is to remain a traditional company and risk being disrupted.

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Hittech wants employees to drive their own success

IEMC for mechatronic engineers - Testimonial Stefan Vossen
Training programs can be an effective tool for any high-tech company to attract new talent and help employees sharpen their skills. To Development Manager Stefan Vossen of Hittech Multin, training courses provide something much more important – a chance to discover your intrinsic motivation and realize your passion. Hittech Multin organized the ‘EMC for mechatronic engineers‘ training in-company.

In 1994, Cor Heijwegen stepped down as a divisional director within the Hoogovens Group. The group consisted of numerous companies that supplied Hoogovens, now Tata Steel, with tools and materials used in the production of iron, steel and aluminum. On his way out, Heijwegen and a couple of colleagues decided to start their own business comprised of several of the Hoogovens suppliers, which was called Hoogovens Industriele Toelevering (Hoogovens Industrial Supply) or Hit Group. In 2004, it was incorporated as Hittech Group. Today, the corporation consists of eight self-governing, but not independent outfits, managed by a small holding company. By design, the companies are kept small, less than 100 people, to ensure flexibility, entrepreneurship and a focus on the customer.

One of Hittech’s subsidiaries, Hittech Multin specializes in the development and production of mechatronic products for the medical, semiconductor, measurement and analytical industries. These products are subject to high qualification requirements and are often associated with accurate positioning, optics, vacuum technology, cleanliness and medical regulations. To achieve this, the Hague-based Multin branch requires a staff with a strong technological background, as well as the desire to enhance skills through training.

'To work here requires the mindset and an urgency to constantly improve and the willingness to really engage with customers.'

“It’s no wonder that the majority of the development capacity of Hittech Group sits under the roof of Hittech Multin,” remarks Development Manager Stefan Vossen. “To work here requires the mindset and an urgency to constantly improve and the willingness to really engage with customers. That’s why so many of the technological advancements of Hittech are developed in, and with involvement from, this department.”


Stefan Vossen from Hittech Multin organized the ‘EMC for mechatronic engineers’ training in-company. Photo by Fotowerkt.nl

Philosophy

To maintain the customer-oriented focus, Hittech is continually looking to shake things up and employ out-of-the-box thinking to adapt and better fit its customers’ needs. After all, its mantra is “masters in improvement”. One tool the systems development company uses to ensure this is training. “I have a different kind of philosophy when it comes to training. I’ve noticed a number of times when attending my own courses, there’s a stark difference between those that are motivated to be there and others that are obligated to attend,” recalls Vossen. “The truth is, if you’re not intrinsically motivated to be there, you’re not likely to get anything out of it.”

Vossen himself started his career as a scientist at TNO, specializing in electromagnetism. While at the institute, he became interested in coaching others in their professional trajectories. “It was a rather steep growth track, but I attended multiple trainings on coaching. In these courses, I learned so much about myself,” illustrates Vossen. “That’s where I discovered that I really enjoy working with younger people and trying to help them further their career. That’s when I became a team manager and really found my passion for coaching and mentoring young talent. And ever since, that’s where I’ve tried to put my energy.”

Driver’s seat

Another aspect to Vossen’s philosophy on training is that there will never be a fixed course program in his group. Rather, training programs should be tailor-made to custom fit each member. “It really comes down to the needs of the person, of course, within their role on the team. I want to see them be enthusiastic about something and decide for themselves,” says Vossen. “I shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat of their career. That has to come from them, with their own vision and their own interests. I think taking courses is part of that.”

It seems like the approach is paying off. According to Vossen, over the last few years, product development at Hittech has been undergoing a transition. When the company was founded, the focus was on materials knowledge and construction principles, but now, it’s centered on moving mechanisms and mechatronics, combined with optics, electronics and software. “As a company, we’re offering fully integrated products. But with this transition, we’ve really had to intensify the systems engineering within the group,” expresses Vossen. “This shift meant we needed to adapt and improve our capabilities and I had a number of our engineers requesting to enroll in training courses.”

ROI

Recently, there was such an interest in an EMC training course that Hittech decided to commission a company edition of High Tech Institute’s “EMC for mechatronic engineers”. “When we select training courses, we don’t want a standard, textbook type of course. It’s important for us to find trainings that are taught by people with deep roots and experience in the high-tech domain,” highlights Vossen. “That’s really why we turned to High Tech Institute. Their trainings are designed for the industry by experts in the industry. It gives me a great level of comfort when arranging these kinds of trainings, as I know the content is always reliable.”

Check out the training

A training, however, is meaningless if it doesn’t lead to results, and of course a return on the investment. Though this can sometimes be difficult to quantify, for Vossen, the data is clear. One specific place he’s noticed marked improvements is in the early stages of system design. Vossen: “I’ve seen that our engineers often come back from training with a fresh new perspective. I notice this particularly in the beginning stages of project planning. For example, in the process of setting up error budgets, the engineers are taking more details into account, specifically with an eye to possible EMC-related issues, very early on. In the past, however, they might have missed these potential issues altogether.”

“Another benefit that I attribute to my employees participating in training programs is that it seems to help foster communication. Specifically, between those working in groups that consist of engineers from the various disciplines. They seem to understand each other’s needs better and hence take each other more into account from the start. And while no project is perfect the first time around, the better your specs and conditions are at the beginning of a project, the better and smoother the project is sure to go.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.3 out of 10.

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Why you’re not deploying AI

Imagine the following scenario. A (sizable) team at a large company writes customer documents in response to customer requests. They request help from the automation team to reduce their repetitive tasks. The automation team brings in an AI company, which develops an ML model that generates the customer documents automatically and virtually eliminates the need for human involvement. The prototype works amazingly well and both the AI company and the automation team are eager to move it into production as the cost savings, as well as the speed and quality of response to customers, are bound to improve significantly.

Sounds like a success story, right? Well, in this case, as well as in other cases that I’ve seen, the company managed to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. The solution wasn’t deployed. It’s probably not the end of the story and hopefully, the solution will be rolled out in the future, but the company experiences a significant delay in reaping the benefits from what should have been a straightforward and obvious deployment.

The pattern as I’ve seen it is that if AI is used to improve some product capability and it doesn’t affect existing organizational units nor existing processes, the deployment of the ML/DL model is quick and fairly seamless. The moment, however, existing organizations or teams are threatened in their existence or asked to reduce significantly in size or when existing work processes need to be adjusted to achieve the benefits, things rapidly grind to a halt and many in the organization start to backpedal.

 

Evolution stages of adopting ML/DL

In an earlier post, I presented the stages that companies go through when adding ML/DL to products. As shown in the figure, the first stage is experimenting & prototyping. Every company I work with has a host of those initiatives ongoing. However, when looking to transition successful prototypes and proofs of concept to actual deployment, we run into roadblocks.

The first and obvious roadblock is that you now need AI engineering to ensure that you have industry-strength, production-quality deployment of AI and, as I discussed in an earlier post, that requires a set of solutions, architecture, infrastructure and processes that are often not recognized by data scientists and people without an engineering background.

The second and more important roadblock is that the potential of AI is to significantly reduce cost while improving speed and quality. The fact is that for most companies, the primary cost driver is salaries. So, to reap the benefits of AI, it means reallocating or releasing the people that currently are doing the job that will be replaced by ML/DL models.

'It’s almost painful to write it down and not feel like an idiot'

This is so obvious that it’s almost painful to write it down and not feel like an idiot, but I keep running into situations like the scenario that we started with. Everyone loves AI and it’s on the top of the hype cycle. Everyone talks about all the great opportunities and benefits that AI will bring to their organization and society at large. But when it hits close to home, the willingness to change and reap the benefits suddenly is severely lacking.

This is a problem as the competition isn’t sitting still. We need to go through the painful process of reaping the benefits by reducing cost, redesigning processes, reallocating people and aligning your organization with the benefits that AI can offer. As I wrote earlier, it’s not what AI can do for you; the question is how you redesign your entire organization, business models, products, customer engagement models and ways of working to align with digitalization, meaning software, data and AI. This is the only way to capture the potential of AI to the full extent and the only way that you stay competitive in the long run.

In the startup community, large companies are often referred to as dinosaurs, ie slow, set in their ways and consequently ripe for disruption. Don’t be a dinosaur!

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Taking inventory after two days Cooling of Electronics

Coolcat okki
“Wendy Luiten describes the first two training days of her first online Cooling of Electronics. “I’m used to looking into the classroom. Then I immediately see how the material lands.” Because of this, the pace of this remote classroom is a bit slower, according to Wendy. “In classroom trainings, I talk to people and it’s easier to look over shoulders.”

When I called her on the evening of the second day of the training, Wendy said that she was quite tired the day before, but that it was already getting better. “It takes some getting used to. Hopefully, it will continue this way over the next three days.”


Cat Okkie was the very first participant of Wendy’s online module. After attending the first two days, Okkie seems happy. Credits: Martine Raaijmakers.

During Wendy’s presentations, the cameras of many participants are off. In part, they do this to squeeze the highest quality video and audio out of the connection. But it has also been common practice for many years for remote consultations. Wendy: “At video meetings, people say hello at the start, then we have a suggestion round and then, the cameras go off. With video view, the tension curve is also more intense.”

Check out the training

Furthermore – and this was also to be expected – students do not automatically look for each other during breaks for social interaction. In the classroom version, there is usually a positive vibe at the coffee machine. “Now, that’s almost gone,” says Wendy. “If I want them to look for each other, I have to give them a push. It’s something to remember for next time.”

'They have to learn to make decisions at the CAD drawing level because it's only a design when you can draw it.'

The Cooling of Electronics training course is strongly practice-oriented. “People often run into very practical issues in their work. They often have more than enough theoretical background, but are faced with very simple decisions: where should the gap be, or how much space needs to be saved? Therefore, my training is quite concrete. During the exercises, people work with a spreadsheet because that is sufficient for a first-order assessment. They have to learn to make decisions at the CAD drawing level because it’s only a design when you can draw it”.

Wendy estimates that she spends about 60 percent of the time ‘sending’ (lecturing), while the other 40 percent of the time, the students spend 40 doing exercises. Initially, she planned to save exercises for the end of the day. In the meantime, however, she has noticed that it’s best to go between theory and practice. “And it works well to turn on the cameras during the exercises.”

Because of the excellent preparation, there were no technical issues. However, there was still a small bump. Wendy and program leader Hans Vink sent the material via WeTransfer, but some companies do not allow the use of this tool for large digital mail items. The solution was simple: the participants concerned solved it via their private email address.

This blog is the second blog of a series in which we share our first experiences with online training.
Read the first blog here.

Soon: the evaluation by the participants.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 9.4 out of 10.

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Don’t be like everyone else

This week, I had a wonderful conversation with the CEO of a midsized company (around 1,000 employees) to discuss business strategy and the implications on technology strategy in the overall context of digitalization. As the company supports its customers with digital solutions, it’s an example of the part of the economy that’s doing really well under the current circumstances. It’s a good reminder of the fact that it’s not so much that the economy is cratering, but rather that there are quite fundamental and accelerated shifts towards digitalization taking place in it. It’s just that news outlets prefer to talk about bad news (companies going out of business) instead of good news (the business of some companies is booming) because bad news sells more ads (if it bleeds, it leads).

The discussion with this CEO focused on the positioning of the company. It has much smaller competitors, as well as those that are (much) bigger and the question becomes how to differentiate your organization from these competitors. The simple answer is to do what they do but better or cheaper. However, as Einstein so eloquently said, for every problem, there’s an answer that’s simple, elegant and wrong.

The slightly less simplistic answer is to focus on one of the corners of the competitive triangle (customer intimacy, technology leadership or operational excellence) and organize your company based on that. Again, this perspective isn’t necessarily wrong, but it fails to give guidance as the question then becomes when to use what strategy.

'Commodity, differentiating and innovative functionality each require a different strategy'

In an earlier post, I introduced the three-layer product model where the functionality in a product, a platform or a product portfolio is organized into a layer of commodity functionality, a layer of differentiating functionality and a layer of innovative and experimental functionality. In our discussion, I realized that each of these layers requires a different strategy.

For commodity functionality, the focus should be on operational excellence as you’re looking to reduce the total cost of ownership for that layer to the minimum possible. This demands that you limit the alternative systems to deliver this functionality to the lowest possible number, preferably one. I still meet companies that have multiple solutions for the same commodity functionality and that can’t find the prioritization to reduce the number of alternatives and consequently continue to have outsized associated costs. In general, the goal should be to centralize, standardize and prepare for outsourcing the delivery of commodity functionality.

The differentiating functionality needs an alternative strategy: customer intimacy. This functionality is the key reason customers pick us over competitors and consequently, we need to work closely with customers to maximize the value we deliver to them. Here, the introduction of variants may well be justified as long as we’re able to monetize our efforts. At some point, what’s differentiating now will start to commoditize and then the rules of the game change to what we described above.

Finally, for the innovation and experimentation layer, the key strategy should be technology and product leadership. This is where we explore new innovations, which often are technology driven and which hopefully form our future differentiation. The success metric here is the number of things we can try out against our, often limited, budget. And if I say “try out,” I mean of course to evaluate ideas with customers. It’s too easy to get hung up in our own set of beliefs. Instead, work with customers and observe. Customers will never ask you for an innovation (and if they do, you’re in bigger trouble than you think) but will use what’s valuable to them.

Back to the discussion with the CEO: we concluded that it’s easy to look at our competitors, typically the larger ones, and consider copying what they’re doing, which typically focuses on standardizing and preparing for scaling. Or, to look at smaller competitors and focus on agility and customer intimacy. Although it’s perfectly alright to be inspired by what others are doing and to “steal with pride,” as leaders it remains your key responsibility to define a business strategy that’s uniquely different from the others in the industry. Being like everyone else lands you in a red ocean where cost and slim margins are the only things you can think about. Instead, be different in a way that matters to customers, find your blue ocean and build a great business. And, to quote Steve Jobs, if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking!

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Object-oriented analysis and design training not entirely online, but blended

Training in software engineering can be done online, one might say. But when Onno van Roosmalen and Martijn Ceelen sat down last month to make their Object-oriented analysis and design course corona-proof, they could not come up with a 100-percent remote version.

For the two seasoned trainers, who are mainly driven by effectiveness, the problem to solve was the extent to which the training would stick with participants. It is through this lens, however, that the gentlemen decided that  Corona was not going to win without a fight. Instead, Onno and Martijn came up with a blended learning variant of their much sought-after OO design training, one of which they expect the fabric to stick even better, through more practice and intensive personal online guidance.

In the training ‘Object-oriented analysis and design’ participants draw their designs out of hand. Trainer Martijn Ceelen even still likes to use overheadsheets for that.

The duo will use Canvas, the online learning system that High Tech Institute has been using for the past several months. Martijn was already familiar with it, and Onno was “pleasantly surprised” when he saw the possibilities. Unlike the physical training, Onno and Martijn explicitly ask the participants to bring their own work with them. They expect that by utilizing existing cases, course-goers will be better able to put what they have learned into practice.

On 18 and 19 June, the course will kick off from the virtual classroom, with a maximum of twelve students joining the online training for six hours each day. The two-day completion of the course will be held in-person in September.

During the months in between, there will be an online question session every two weeks. The students ask questions and discuss the cases they have brought in from their own practice. “That’s the crux,” says Onno. He expects that this will ensure that the methods learned will stick even better.

In the future, Onno and Martijn expect to offer online coaching and guidance to former students as a refresher opportunity. “But first, we want to gain experience with it during the next session.”

In the past, Onno provided online training via another system. At the time, that was a bit of help. “I couldn’t see the students, so I set up a second screen with the photos of my students.” The preparation for the blended version is almost finished. “I’m going to buy another new router, so my Wi-Fi works perfectly.”

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System requirements defined by cascades of creativity

System requirements engineering trainer
With more than 30 years of experience with some of the top names in the Netherlands’ high-tech industry, Cees Michielsen reflects on his lessons learned and how he tries to relay this knowledge as the instructor of the “System requirements engineering improvement” training at High Tech Institute.

It was 1986 when Cees Michielsen got his start in the world of high tech. At the time, he joined the Philips EMT team, which would later become Assembleon and finally Kulicke & Soffa, to help build SMD placement robots. “Back then, our main customers were automotive companies like Ford, GM and Chrysler. We were completely self-contained and had all the essential disciplines and competencies in our business unit,” Michielsen recalls.

Then he entered the team, Michielsen’s focus was on technical informatics, but early on, the trajectory of his career took a detour. “It was there at Philips that I started to develop into a systems thinker, and really got away from my own software discipline,” expresses Michielsen. “In hindsight, I can say that was the best start for me in my career; the experience gave me an enormous head start and is why I’m still so passionate about it today.”

System requirements engineering trainer
“It was there at Philips that I started to develop into a systems thinker, and really got away from my own software discipline,” expresses Cees Michielsen.

Now, after more than three decades in the industry, Michielsen is spending his days as a requirements engineer at ASML, as well as an instructor at High Tech Institute where he shares his knowledge, and his many lessons learned, with the next generation of engineers in the “Systems requirements engineering improvement” training.

Abstraction layers

In systems requirements engineering, especially at the system level, scoping the problem is the name of the game. It’s about determining exactly what functions the system should have, the specific properties that are tied to those functions and accurately defining the problem being solved. “If we’re, for instance, talking about projecting patterns on wafers, you can imagine that’s the main function of the system, and several companies might be doing the same thing. But it’s the properties of this function that distinguish one group from its competitors – the accuracy, yield, speed and reliability,” highlights Michielsen.

For Michielsen, it’s these characteristics that make all the difference in the world, and requirements engineering is the art of identifying the right functions and quantifying their properties to define the problem. “Once the problem is well-defined, finding the solution is much easier,” Michielsen points out. “But you’re not going to find the implementation of your solution straightaway, so you’re probably going to go through a number of abstraction or decomposition layers.”

Cascade

During his training session, Michielsen explains that, in a system, the highest layer of abstraction is the level with the most general requirements, ie the system needs to be fast or have a certain look. But as you go down deeper into the system, it gets much more detailed. Suddenly, the layers are referring to different subjects or using different languages to express the requirements, which can be a little tricky for engineers to keep the information flowing.

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“That’s the real objective of requirements engineering, finding different ways to ensure that the data continues to cascade from top to bottom and from stakeholder needs to implementation, all without losing any information,” suggests Michielsen. “I think if I were to summarize the challenge for requirements engineering, I would say that it lies mainly in the cascading of information throughout each abstraction or decomposition layer.”

Quantification

According to Michielsen, one very important part of the method is to find the complete set of requirements for a system. “The question quickly becomes, ‘when is the set complete?’”, he poses. “The best approach we’ve seen so far can be expressed using an equation, which we share in the training. It allows us to fully define a system by its functions, properties and constraints, and can be applied from the highest levels to the components and parts at the lowest points.” He continues, “By specifying and quantifying these criteria, the true requirements can be derived. This is one of the main steps of the training, learning how to put a value on each of the properties of the system.”

“Once the goals are defined, we can identify solutions – design options – based on assumed capabilities of subsystems. This is where creativity leads the product development process, as many different options are considered for solving the problem,” Michielsen depicts. “As long as we document the assumptions that are made during that creative design process, we can later translate these assumptions into requirements for the lower-level subsystems that we need in the solution.”

Justification

To Michielsen, this is one of the most powerful elements of the whole method. The ability to see the complete line of logic from a quantified system definition to the design decisions and finally to the specific implementation of a solution. That is, if engineers are able to maintain coherence between system requirements, system design and system decisions – a crucial factor.

“As long as the information feeds properly, we can derive requirements for the next layer and continue the cascade. That way we can ensure that whatever requirements we end up with at the lowest component level, through our method and our traceability, we can exactly come to the justification of each requirement and each decision made throughout each layer. That’s the whole essence of the method.”

Trainer System Requirements Engineering
“As a trainer, I want to help instill confidence in the process”, says Michielsen.

After more than 30 years in the industry, what do you most want to share in your trainings?

“As a trainer, I want to help instill confidence in the process. Following the method is one way to achieve that, because the students get the feeling that the system can be complete, consistent and correct – in terms of specifications. That can really help it feel less daunting. Once you cross that hurdle, the students can almost immediately start determining the main functions of the system and decide what properties are related and which constraints apply at that level. By quantifying these aspects, they don’t just state that the system should be reliable, they say explicitly just how reliable the system should be.”

Lessons Learned

With his 30+ years in process architecting, Michielsen has developed several practical methods to keep the information flowing from layer to layer. His success in the field opened the door for him to work with top Dutch and European companies, like Prorail, Eurocontrol, Punch Powertrain and Vanderlande – and several others, to help establish and implement processes for their own requirements engineering programs. “What I found was that there are enormous differences between each company, especially in implementation,” recollects Michielsen. “When I went to work for DAF, we put in place a complete requirements engineering process in three years’ time. We could successfully train hundreds of engineers and the method was paying off.”

'It certainly was a big learning experience for me, and it came with a lot of tough lessons learned.'

Noting the success of the DAF project, Siemens called to lure Michielsen to Germany to help establish the same approach for Daimler. “It was a huge step for me to be invited to implement the system, but it quickly became clear that the approach we developed at DAF wasn’t going to be transferrable to Daimler,” Michielsen calls to mind. “Daimler was just organized in a completely different manner, with responsibilities being spread among departments and people in a way that made successful execution really difficult. The inability to get something going there was disappointing,” he says, continuing, “It certainly was a big learning experience for me, and it came with a lot of tough lessons learned.”

Are these lessons learned what drives you in this domain?

“In part, yes. I have an enormous passion for this whole process. I want to help improve product capabilities and productmanufacturing capabilities, especially in the area where I live and work. I want to make an impact on industry in that sense because we’ve learned so much and I want to spread this information,” emphasizes Michielsen. “It’s not all my doing, it’s all the companies I’ve worked for and all my experiences. I’m extremely grateful for being able to do that, and I’d like to spread that knowledge to make sure that the entire ecosystem can benefit, and we grow from it.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.5 out of 10.

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Don’t let your habits define you

This week, I had a meeting with the leadership team of a company that has asked me for help to accelerate their growth. We’ve been reconvening regularly and going through the process of defining who we are and what our purpose is as a business, identified the key avenues to accelerate growth, created a plan to execute on and operating mechanisms to follow up.

The weird thing is that we’ve been consistently running behind the plan in terms of execution and when I pointed this out to them, I got the usual excuses of internal dependencies, external factors outside the control of the team and so on. However, at the core, something else was going on. The team has been working together for more than a decade, during which the company went through some difficult times that resulted in their having become extremely careful and risk avoidant. Over the years, they’ve developed a set of habits that ensure wide safety margins. For instance, any new hiring only takes place after the revenue from customers for the new hire has been guaranteed for a long time to come.

The surprising thing is that these habits might have been useful at some point in the past, but at this stage where the company has raised a good chunk of funding, there’s no reason to be avoiding financial and business risk. Instead, with the whole COVID-19 situation, now is the time to invest and expand the team with great talent that’s now available because of many companies scaling back.

Not only are the current set of habits counterproductive for what we’re looking to achieve. The team even fully recognizes and admits that this is the case. And yet, as individuals and as a team, they struggle to let go of their habits and old ways of working.

This example is an instance of normal human behavior. Even though we tend to think of ourselves as rational beings that are occasionally bothered by these pesky emotions, the reality is that we’re irrational beings that are, according to some research, for more than 95 percent of the time driven by habits and that have a tendency to post-rationalize our entirely irrational behavior. The brain is a fantastic story-generating machine and most of the time, it’s generating stories explaining to ourselves why we did something.

In many of the companies and teams I work with, I’ve observed the same situation and it’s the leadership team that tends to be at the heart of it. For all the explanations and excuses of why we are in the situation we find ourselves in, basically, it almost always is the leadership team that’s hampering the company’s development and growth. And in the few cases where there really are external factors at play, it still behooves you as a leader to take responsibility anyway as it causes you to shift your mindset from a victim to the protagonist of your own story.

'Is what you’re doing actually the best course of action under the circumstances?'

 

I don’t mean to say that leadership teams of companies that aren’t doing so well need to be universally kicked out and replaced. Instead, I’m asking you, dear reader, to spend more time reflecting on what you do, how you behave, why you believe you do these things and to what extent it might be that you’re post-rationalizing non-constructive behavior. The only way to break out of these situations is by continuously holding up a mirror to yourself and carefully analyzing whether what you’re doing is actually the best course of action under the circumstances. To me, that’s the most effective, or even the only way, to continuously learn, improve and reinvent yourself and your organization.

As Lao Tzu famously said: “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” And I believe that we should all aim for the highest destiny we can accomplish in our lifetimes.

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High Tech Institute introduces you to the first online participant for Cooling of Electronics: cat Okkie

Electronics training by Wendy Luiten
After a lot of preparation and sometimes a bit of fiddling, the time has come. In the last couple of weeks Wendy Luiten was practicing her first remote Cooling of Electronics training with her cat Okkie as the first participant. “Of course I’m regularly in team meetings but providing a training is something else”. As of today the online edition starts.


Credits: Martine Raaijmakers

Wendy already gained experience with online training two days after the lock down. “I heard on Tuesday at 8 a.m. that Philips employees had to work from home. On Thursday was the last day of the already running Green Belt training at Philips. So we immediately switched to online on  Teams. At that time I had two advantages: I knew the students and they were used to online meetings via Teams”.

This week is different. The eight participants of “Electronics cooling thermal design” don’t know each other and some of them didn’t use Teams before.

'It's a trial run, there are always areas for improvement, and you won't find out until you try.'

Wendy’s unconcerned about potential problems. She sees tooling and in particular Microsoft’s applications as a natural phenomenon. “It is working and then we’re happy, sometimes it is not working” she says. “In my experience, the ancestor Skype always worked. Teams is more recent, but meanwhile widely deployed everywhere. In the US there are clusters of universities and schools on the educational version. I have no reason to believe that it will cause problems this week. It’s a trial run, there are always areas for improvement, and you won’t find out until you try.

In order to make the material suitable for online modules, Wendy went through all files again. The slides, the practice exercises, the case study. “From a distance, the storyline and story telling becomes more important, because you can’t see exactly how the material lands,” she says. Incidentally, Wendy isn’t going to use the special version of Teams for Education. “That doesn’t add any value for me or the participants. With the educational version, people get an email address and access to share-point, among other things. Students then have to work with user aliases and so on. This puts a burden on IT that you don’t want for a few days of training”.

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Credits: Martine Raaijmakers

About the preparation of the participants: High Tech Institute’s partner for electronics courses Hans Vink personally approached all cooling participants three weeks ago. After all, everyone knows the hassle when you end up in a new video conferencing environment with a group for the first time. Do you see me! How do I mute my microphone? These kinds of things. Hans wanted to avoid that at the Team sessions. By the way, we looked at a whole bunch of potential video tools with the High Tech Institute team, but more about that later.

For some clients, Teams is the standard application for meetings, but for others it’s not , so they participate via their web browser. Hans asked all participants whether or not they use Teams and then did a test session with everyone via app or browser to check the settings and to see if all facilities work as needed in the course.

All preparations – don’t hesitate to say: also a lot of extra work – now provide an up beat vibe. Based on the feedback, Hans expects that we will be able to organise online courses every year, as well as the classroom course. “That wouldn’t surprise me”, he says, “We already have sufficient participants for the classroom course in mid-November”.

With that, Wendy’s satisfied too. She regularly receives training requests from all over the world. Offering online modules lowers the threshold to train technology professionals from for example Silicon Valley or India.

This blog is part of a series in which we share our first experiences with online training. 

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 9.4 out of 10.