Generic Term: Specs
This article uses the common expression "spec" to refer to specifications, codes, standards, laws, and contract obligations.
Almost every specification refers to other specifications, which may refer to other specifications, so that you actually face "trees" of specifications, all requiring your compliance.
You will usually be informed of the applicable specs by your managers, but they may miss some. If you do not comply with an applicable spec, you will have to redesign, with cost to your organization and criticism of yourself whether or not it was your fault. It is good practice to assure yourself independently that you know all applicable specs.
Kinds of Specs
Contracts
There are requirements in your company's contracts with customers, vendors, licensers and licensees, and labor organizations which have the force of specifications.
Military specs
A major class of specs consists of military (MIL specs) and other federal specs which apply to federal purchases. Nonfederal customers may recite MIL specs as applying to their purchases as a way of securing high quality despite the perhaps unnecessarily high cost which may come with it.
Trade Associations and Professional Societies
Many specifications and standards are published by trade associations and professional societies. Among the professional societies that issue standards and codes are:
- American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)
- American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- American Gear Manufacturers Association (AGMA)
- Electronic Industries Association (EIA)
- National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA)
- National Machine Tool Builders Association (NMTBA)
Some of the standards issued by professional societies have the force of law if a legal controversy arises. Failure to conform to specs can have devastating costs if there is a product liability lawsuit against your company and the plaintiff can argue that an injury or a loss occurred as a result of your failure to conform to a code or standard.
Laws
There are many specifications and codes of practice which appear in acts of legislation. For example, there are federal and state antipollution laws and safety laws with special enforcement agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Government agencies may be authorized by law to issue their own regulations, which, in effect, are additional laws. There are state, county, and municipal codes. It is quite possible to make a product which is fully legal in the place where it is built and is illegal, in details, in the place where it is to be installed and used. For example, the electrical code of Santa Monica, California, is stricter than the National Electrical Code, which applies almost everywhere else. Use your company's attorney as a consultant in such matters.
Your Company's Specs
Your own company probably has specs which apply to the product you are designing. Company specs may exist for materials, tolerances, preferred components, manufacturing processes, etc.
Commercial Organization Specs
Some commercial organizations publish general specs for their own particular reasons. An example is the National Electrical Code, which is issued by the National Fire Protection Association to reduce fire losses and which is the basis of most municipal codes. Another example is the set of specs issued by Underwriters Laboratories (UL), whose business is testing products for safety. (You should find out early whether your product will require UL approval. It may consume a good deal of your design scheduled time and some of your budget to get UL tests and approval.)
Vendor specs
Your vendors issue specs on the properties, limitations, and uses of the materials and components they sell to you. If you violate these specs, you invalidate their warranties and you may make your own product not work or be unreliable.
Customer specs
Your customer may issue a spec on the product it is purchasing, and this in turn may refer to other specs, including general specs for products purchased by that company. The automobile companies, the machine tool companies, and many large corporations have elaborate general specs. Your customer may be your own company if you are designing a new standard product or special equipment for in-house use.
Foreign specs
If your product is to be sold outside the United States, there are many foreign specs to meet. Some are international, and some are national and local. Among organizations issuing specs are the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) and the Deutsches Institut fur Normung (DIN), the German standards institute. Metrication is an obvious spec for products going to countries not using English units; there are specs for signs using non-language standard symbols, and there are specs for different voltages (e.g., 220/50).
Patents
In a sense, other people's patents are specs on what you may not do. Your company is exposed to lawsuits for "unsuitability of your design for its intended use," for lateness in delivery of the product, and for breach of contract if your design does not conform to all the contract specs. Your company can be sued for patent infringement, so you should get assurance from your manager that an infringement patent search has been made and that no infringement has been found. (In practice, this may really be your suggesting to your manager that such a search be made, and rather early in the program so you have a chance to "invent around" potential infringements.)
Unwritten specs
In addition to the expressed requirements of written specifications, standards, and codes, there are unwritten specs: the requirements of the culture, conventions, and fashions of the market to which you are selling. This is true not only in the field of consumer products but also in technical and capital goods markets.
Classes of toys come into fashion and go out of fashion as rapidly as fashions in clothing. The same is true of fashions in military hardware, airports, consumer electronics, and numerous other products for which the change in fashion is unrelated to development of technology.
American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
A single source for almost all general specs other than MIL specs is the American National Standards Institute.2 You should buy its catalog if your company does not already have it. Among the hundreds of specs listed are Drafting Practices Standards, which your company may choose to adopt independently of any specific design project. ANSI will send you, on request, publications describing its standards in detail.
Common Law: Torts
You and your company are subject to the common law. If you are responsible for injury or property loss to someone else (a "tort"), you can be sued for damages. To you as a designer this boils down to whether a tort is due to your faulty design. This is no small matter. Damage awards now can run into millions of dollars. Theoretically you personally are liable as well as your company. The usual form of lawsuit which you should worry about is called a product liability lawsuit. What should you do about it?
Defenses
When designing, keep safety always in mind. Predict all possible modes of failure, and include provisions to protect users and bystanders in case of each of them. Learn all applicable OSHA rules. Keep records of your design studies and tests so that you can testify in court that you have acted properly. ("Negligence" is the ultimate dirty word.) If you design equipment for your own or customers' factories, you are directly subject to OSHA rules and inspections.
Employees
You may interview potential employees, and you will certainly supervise other employees sooner or later. There are laws with severe penalties if you do it wrong. Most of these laws deal with discrimination for sex, race, or religion. You should get trained in what these laws are as they affect you.
Your P.E. License
Most states require that drawings for installations affecting public health or safety be signed by a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.). It may be in your interest and your company's interest to get your P.E. license.
Please note that the above is only a fragmentary list. This article shows the kinds of things applying to your projects which you had better find out about.
Specifications are not just obstacles to be overcome. Implicit in many specifications is an education on particulars of good design.
Dealing with Customers
Customer specifications can be sources of anxiety and great effort when you try to interpret and conform conscientiously. You can face ambiguous wording and difficulty in securing interpretation from customers themselves. Customer enforcement varies from lax to maliciously diligent.
(You may feel that such trivia are beneath your dignity as a professional engineer, but your company comptroller will be glad to explain to you why he or she disagrees and why getting paid by the customer is so important.)
Buyers' specs describe what they think they want and what they think they can get for what they think it will cost. They may be wrong on many counts, as revealed by the design process. Certain requirements may turn out to be much more difficult to achieve than expected and others unexpectedly easy to exceed. As you work on the design (or proposal), some desirable but unspecified features may be invented by you and others may become, in your mind, not very useful, at least as specified.
The relationship which gives customers the best and the most for their money and gives the vendor a reasonable chance for a reasonable profit is one in which spec and price are in continuous renegotiation from the beginning until the product is accepted. Sometimes a proposed spec change may give the buyer more or better product and the seller more profit at the same price; sometimes it may give the buyer more or better at an acceptable increase in price.
In the real world there is a conflict between buyer and seller about how much product the buyer gets and how much money the seller gets. It is up to your marketing department (which may be you if you are an entrepreneur) to know the various procedures of bid to price, proposal and bid to general spec, unsolicited proposal (usually after informal proposals and discussion), proposed renegotiations of spec and price, and the many incentive formulas of government contracting.
You may find an opportunity to practice your persuasive power on your marketers to get them to take a renegotiating initiative when you have a great new idea.
Negotiating
Do not assume that you should only look after your own interest in negotiations and that it's the customers' responsibility to look after theirs. If they have not done a good job for themselves, sooner or later their people will get angry and blame you, and there will be a big fight before you get paid.
Customer's Duties to You
There is a reverse aspect to the meeting of specs. Specs also require customers to provide parts, test equipment, environment, and interfaces with which your equipment is designed to operate. Insist that customers meet their part of the spec, or you will be undertaking the impossible.
Please don't be overwhelmed by the world of specs; just take them as seriously as you take engineering analysis.
