Much as it's sold as an issue tracker for developers, in real life, it's used for all sorts of processes. Hardware development, planning a wedding, tracking safety investigations, running a household, etc - all things that people do with JIRA. As your hardware people probably need to work quite closely with the others, sharing a JIRA installation is a very good idea.
There isn't really a "best" approach for you, because a lot of it depends on what you're doing. The best approach I can suggest is that you sketch out a desired process or processes and configure JIRA to meet that.
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