Senior Process Engineer
Illuminate USA
Please provide a summary of your job or research. What is an average day like? What are some duties performed?
Being in a senior or advanced position always means you wear multiple hats. On a daily basis I maybe assisting Junior, Mid & other senior associates with improving their tasks and presentation skills; running trial runs with other departments/teams depending on the goal; hosting planning meetings to define upcoming process & design changes; providing additional support on the line when manufacturing issues arise that require more man power to fix the issue; line audits for inefficiencies (operation, quality, etc., tasks); writing work instructions and other documentation to support current process gaps as well as for new operations; working with logistics and planning to make sure bottle necks are defined and reduced to meet customer work orders; Reviewing more advanced streams of data to find links with production issues to name a few.
What is your educational background and what prompted you to go this direction?
I have a B.S. in Material Science & Engineering from OSU and am a student for life, but realized early on that I didn’t need a MS or PhD to continue to learn. I was/am drawn to advanced manufacturing due to its complexity and availability of position options.
What have you struggled with or overcome in your educational path or life path to get to this point?
As much as I enjoy working in manufacturing I struggle with just maintaining a single process or product. Companies that have a fixed product end up with certain quality issues that they either want to invest in efficiency improvements or make no changes and deal with the issues. I have focused on paths where companies prioritize innovation through design and understanding of true root cause. One aspect that has grown along my career path has been to focus on data & presenting only data, while learning to remove emotion from presentations & selling improvements.
What is the best part of your job/research?
I get to define how the next generation of products is designed and/or manufactured.
What is the worst part?
Everyone has good ideas. Not everyone can sell it/them. The worst part is always documentation. Documentation is always the proof that someone or a company knows what they are talking about.
What’s the most exciting part of your job?
People. I could have decided on many other professional paths but a lot of them you can do from home, by yourself. You may not get to always choose who you get to work with, but finding a team or group that leads and compliments each other is an amazing experience.
What has changed about your profession in the past ten years?
My drive is to solve problems. Functionally I have worked in most manufacturing roles to get projects to completion. I started my career as a process engineer where they were not a fan or used to someone wanting to actually work on the equipment and turn a wrench. I excelled at using information from both aspects to make the quick response time in each area better and faster. I then transitioned to a role within a different product category where I was in a quality style role and confirming new products for production, which led to traveling across the world to inspect and audit the supply chain to make sure the products were being produced correctly. I then was driven to a more development role where I was working with designers and developing next generation assembly lines.
What do you think will change in the next ten?
I hope to continue to be part of a tight group that is always challenging methods. In particular, the Controls side for where the “Logic” is, will change. On the outside it may look the same, but just as computers have changed in the last 10-20-30 years, PLC’ are also evolving. As PLC’s evolve so will our manufacturing methods.
