How productive is your R&D organization?

By _Numetrics Insights Blog

June 22, 2010

From the business perspective of a semiconductor company, Numetrics’ solutions are about making substantial improvements in chip development productivity and schedule predictability. But just what is productivity, and how do you first characterize it and then improve it? What’s the outcome?

Productivity drives development throughput in your R&D organization – the higher the productivity, the greater the throughput. And throughput is a measure of how much product the engineering organization churns out during a given period of time.

There are three ways to boost R&D throughput:

• Add headcount
• Increase work-hours per week
• Raise utilization and productivity

The first two have downside: Raising R&D headcount increases cost, and more hours lead to workforce burnout and high turnover.

The only viable long-term strategies for sustaining high throughput are to increase engineering utilization and productivity.

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