Designing ICs is tough business. According to an article in Automotive Design Line, "…a single chip development project may involve 100,000 design files or more, usually organized in separate incompatible databases. Changes are frequent and must be reflected in every part of the design, often across teams of hundreds of engineers scattered around the world and working for different companies."

Sure, we've all read about PLM and countless companies who have implemented lifecycle management systems. Sometimes, it's interesting to be reminded of just how high the stakes are. The article continues, "With complex chips, the cost of a mistake, especially one late in the design cycle, could be catastrophic. A design flaw undetected until tape-out could mean scraping a mask worth $500,000, delaying a new product launch by months, and dashing plans to be first to market."

Huh. Half a million dollars for a mistake? High stakes, indeed.

For some companies, however, the stakes--while high--aren't quite so scary. The Hayes Company, in Wichita, KS, has for 25 years manufactured wood fencing and associated products. Perhaps not as high tech as manufacturing ICs. From another article, this one at TheManufacturer.com, "High technology is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about animal statuary and garden gnomes." Particularly interesting about Hayes, however, is one of their top-selling products: the flying pig.

Hey, this is not a place for joking. (Okay, sometimes it is.) I'm serious here. (Okay, sometimes I'm not.)

"Winged pigs have been good to the Hayes Co. The Wichita manufacturer sells thousands of hand-painted polyresin porkers, metal planters, and other lawn ornaments to retail powerhouses such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot," says Eric Sherman who authored this article in Fortune.

That article continues, "In the past, designers might submit, at the company's request, two dozen preliminary sketches. Hayes's in-house modeling shop would build a prototype from each. At this point the marketing, sales, and manufacturing departments would start suggesting changes—make the pig fatter, increase its height by two inches, lengthen the tail. Each set of changes would require a new prototype. Yet there was no easy way to record who requested changes or why.

"Nor did Hayes keep centralized records of dimensions, weights, material costs, or even blueprints. "It was not unheard of for the sales department to haul prototypes that it liked off to a sales meeting," says Hayes president Glenn R. Waisner. "That was great, but there were no engineering drawings for that item." If someone wanted to buy a batch, the company literally had to reverse-engineer from the sample."

Yes, I'll give away the punch line. Hayes implemented a PLM system. The result was, of course, very positive. For example, Glen Waisner, President of the company, says that the new Matrix 10 PLM system from Matrix One, "…affords us a host of advantages, some of which stem from automation, some from increased accountability because, by the nature of these systems, everything is tracked constantly: 'Who's done what to a product or process?'" And Waisner stresses that this tracked knowledge provides more than a one-time benefit throughout continued product innovation "because the [same] opportunities keep circling back: 'Why did we make this change in this particular product at this point in time?' Somebody needs to address that, and we'll know who that 'someone' is."

(Tying into previous reader comments about managers and presidents coming from sales, marketing, or accounting, note that Waisner received a degree in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University, earned an MBA from John Carroll University, Cleveland, and pursued postgraduate studies at the Harvard Law School, there concentrating on negotiation. Extremely impressive, Glen. The outsourcing part needs more serious consideration, though.)

Interesting articles and formidable writers, all.

BUT…

Much as the situation in national and nightly news, why doesn't anyone ask the really tough questions, such as…

• How do buyers at Home Depot, Lowe's, and Wal-Mart track their demand for flying pigs?

• Do they keep straight faces when their systems alert them to reorder flying pigs?

• What's close to flying pigs and lawn gnomes in the inventory tracking systems?

• Is the person who first entered 'flying pig' into the system still employed, or did he or she just walk off the job in laughter? Or did they ask someone else, "Umm, this says 'flying pig.' Did you mean that?"

• Have they done the demographics on who actually buys flying pigs?

• Why do people actually buy flying pigs? And stick them into their lawns? How do the flying pigs feel about this?

• Does a flying pig designed with larger wings require shorter runways, fly higher, or both? What wing length/span would be required to enable a hovering pig? Or a flying pig for air racing?

• Do fatter flying pigs fly lower, stealthily staying under pig radar?

• Do longer tails improve the flying pig directional stability?

• Do they splash-land in mud out of necessity, function, or just for kicks?

• Could a flying pig enter Whitehouse airspace undetected? If not, would fighters be scrambled in an attempt to get the pigs to land safely? How would the pilots communicate to the airspace-violating pigs?

• Would those pigs be interrogated? What if they were evil, terrorist flying pigs? Would they be shipped to Guantanamo? Would they end up on the news as abused flying pigs of potential importance to national security?

• Does the Geneva Convention include provisions for the capture and treatment of flying pigs?

Reasonable, hard-hitting, investigative reporting. Is that too much to ask?