The development of an idea from the drawing board to a real-life product is central to engineering. Whether it’s the latest model of a sports car, a medical device or a new type of substance, it’s engineers that apply the science and develop an idea to its final use in the real world. Companies that specialise in such work, R&D and product development consultancies, therefore have to apply the latest technologies and techniques.
One such company, Cambridge Consultants, has been at the heart of the city’s technology and engineering cluster for more than 40 years, but the past four years have seen it double in size. The company recently announced a deal to acquire US product design consultancy Synapse. And the firm plans to double in size again over the next four years, by expanding globally. The growth is apparent at the company’s Cambridge headquarters, where old buildings from the 1970s and 1980s are being closed and new, modern facilities are being built.
Cambridge Consultants’ core business is helping clients with product development. The company employs more than 600 engineers, who are expected to be specialists in their own areas, and to be prepared to widen their knowledge to help develop ideas. Chief commercial officer Richard Traherne says: “Gone are the days when you could concentrate on individual disciplines. You need the breadth to innovate in the gaps. The magic happens in the gaps.”
Cambridge Consultants’ medical division accounts for 40% of the firm’s business and Traherne uses it as an example to illustrate his point. The company has several projects to develop medical devices that connect to the internet for monitoring and usage reasons. Such work poses core engineering and technology challenges, as well as requiring consumer product design skills, and raising security issues that need to be addressed.
Businesses must adapt
The rise of digital services and the Internet of Things (IoT) is the technology trend causing the most interest among Cambridge Consultants’ clients at the moment, says Traherne. But the main challenge for many of them is not the technology, but how to develop business models that deliver digital services and adopt new ways of interacting and selling to their customers. In response to the trend, Cambridge Consultants has strengthened the business and strategy aspects of its consultancy. The massive impact that an IoT project can have makes a close collaboration with clients more important than ever, he adds.
“It’s almost business change management,” says Traherne. “Companies with a history of designing and making devices that know about things like mechanical engineering, electronics and product design now have to move towards being a company where that device is just an enabler, and what matters are the services that go around it.”
In the medical area people want convenience, tighter medication cycles and faster development workflows. The company recently developed a new form of glucose monitoring device that feeds data to electronic diaries. The device also uses energy scavenging – removing the lid produces enough power to take the measurement and send it to the diary.
Traherne says: “Our engineers are taking really expensive, huge devices and distilling them into miniature over-the-counter consumer items that are cheap but still provide the accuracy required. It has to be fast and quick, but foolproof.”
Another trend important to the firm is machine learning, sometimes called artificial intelligence. Here engineers are working on creating machines that learn patterns from their environment and synthesise answers from them. The company is developing a parking monitoring system that doesn’t need to be calibrated or set up. “The days are gone when people want to fuss about. Home automation hit a stumbling block because all the early versions were too complex. It has to work out of the box,” says Traherne.
The human factor
For example, Cambridge Consultants is working with the Energy Technologies Institute and the Energy System Catapult to develop a system where the services in a house learn about inhabitants’ behaviour and then suggest options for how to use energy more efficiently.
Crucial here is the point where a person interacts with a machine or device, which is often a focus for the firm’s engineers. “We pride ourselves on human factors and user experience,” says Traherne.
Associated with this, he says, is the trend for companies to want to develop a product that people can bond with, like the Apple iPhone. Counterintuitively, the design process to attempt this has to be done in a very analytical way. Engineers have to consider what the client’s customer wants, and focus in on achieving “consumer delight”.
“You then have to wrap around this real analytical rigour, so it doesn’t just work, but it really blows their socks off. It’s a juxtaposition, but you don’t get to that point with a product by accident.”
It’s not just large companies that find themselves pioneering in new technology areas, though. At the other end of the spectrum from Cambridge Consultants, KWSP is a small start-up firm of fewer than 30 people, which works in sectors from automotive and medical to industrial machinery and heritage. It develops products using the latest software tools, and also uses innovative additive layer manufacturing and CNC machining.
KWSP is enjoying a period of rapid expansion. The company’s belief in “digital manufacturing”, an approach that puts the importance of CAD data foremost in the design process and seeks to use that data in innovative ways, has captured an industrial zeitgeist. “We transition customers from an analogue process to a digital one,” says managing director Kieron Salter.
Salter is keen to highlight an Innovate UK-funded project as showing the digital manufacturing approach. Unusually, KWSP is the only participant in Top Cat, a project to develop a low-cost, lightweight automotive chassis platform from thermoset composites. The niche platform could be used in motorsport as a safer chassis than roll cages; it could be used in niche vehicles – think Morgans or TVRs; or it could be licensed to OEMs.
“We’re developing Top Cat from feasibility studies to proof of concept,” says Salter. “Most importantly we’re doing the part about how to make it – how you do the joining, the tooling, the suspension changes. By the end of this year we’ll have a prototype, and next year we’ll have it on the racetrack.”
Tunnel vision
Another example of innovation is tucked around a corner in the company’s offices. KWSP is a partner in a joint venture that is developing a wind tunnel for professional cyclists. The wind tunnel will be a training aid that enables cyclists to obtain data about the drag from the bicycle, allowing them to modify their postures. Previously cyclists have used car wind tunnels but time in them is expensive and does not always produce accurate results.
KWSP’s prototype clamps a bicycle on rollers set into a round table, which sits on struts that in turn sit on precise sensors within a frame. Under the rollers are a chain and cogs which in the final version will be adjustable for resistance and hills, like in an exercise bike. A Microsoft Kinetic camera is positioned in front of the bike to detect the skeletal position of the cyclist.
“This project is a great example of what we do here,” enthuses Salter. “The initial idea was to set up high-definition cameras around a room, with expensive sensors worn by the cyclists. Instead, you can use a Kinetic camera and pressure sensors to create a live table to achieve the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
“It’s not about taking the answer and developing that – we want the problem, the exact problem, and then develop the solution from that. It’s about questioning what’s been done before.”
Among the technology mega-trends, there is plenty of innovation happening around the edges, and for every mega-consultancy there is a smaller one demanding attention. Both small and large present ideas that give encouragement for UK engineering.
Spotlight: Cambridge Consultants
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