Poll of the Day > To any engineers. Do you sometime get clients who want you to over design?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I work as a civil engineer. Some clients want to use as little material as possible while some go with a one-size-fit-all approach even if it means over designing. I can understand reducing cost with the former but cannot fully grasp the reasoning for the latter.

In some cases I assumed the client bought some material in bulk and want to use the same design everywhere instead of multiple unique designs for each location. Some major clients such as theme parks, airports, etc. want to over design for safety reasons. Some are just trying to future-proof the design so the material is still usable later.

I have no experience with the sales aspects of my line of work so can only assumed maybe certain material are more readily available or already made so it is cheaper/easier to use said material instead of sizing down to meet the design criteria.

To those familiar with what I mean or have experienced this, why would some clients want to use more than is necessary for the design criteria?

Comments and opinions are appreciated,

Thank you

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In my experience, you want as many similar designs as possible because the people doing the installation will have an easier time. They'll get faster and make less mistakes as it goes along.

If there are several hundred different in-and-out or bearing connections, it will really slow down installation (because they're staring at details all the time trying to figure out what to do as opposed to performing the same task 50 times). You also want to keep hardware the similar because the parts come in large pallets and if there is a unique piece that only occurs once, workers are not going to want to spend half an hour going through pallets (but if this is needed, you should probably order all the unique hardware in a separate order from the main order).

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SpeedDemon20 posted...

In my experience, you want as many similar designs as possible because the people doing the installation will have an easier time.

Thank you for that reminder. I often look only at the numbers and am occasionally reminded by my supervisor and other engineers to keep in mind the field aspect of a project. Friend of mine works as an airplane mechanic and he loves ragging about engineers who design something without field conditions in mind.

We have had projects that were small enough where cost wise it may not have made much difference between multiple designs that a one-size-fit-all approach made sense. We have also had larger projects where designing for the worst case and applying everywhere would be too expensive so clients would ask us to size components accordingly depending on usage.

Thinking bout it a bit, some manufacturers might simply have standard components that they would commonly use even said components are more than capable of meeting a client's need. Said manufacturers do offer smaller/lighter/weaker components but sometimes still default to their standard.

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