I am an experienced Project Manager/Electrical Engineer with 30+ years’ experience working in manufacturing. I have worked in various roles, including as an electrical engineer, manufacturing engineer, HSE manager, and project engineer.
I spent my first 11 years as an engineer working in Blown film extrusion as an Electrical Engineer in a plant, and then as a Product Design Engineer, installing and supporting equipment at customer sites.
I’ve spent about 15 years in plastic compounding, in multiple roles including Electrical Engineer, Manufacturing Engineer, HSE Manager, and a Project Manager.
In between there, I spent some time in the pharmaceutical industry as an HSE Manager.
Because those roles have all been in manufacturing, each required multiple skill sets, including engineering, field/phone service, programming, developing and presenting training, AutoCad, and all types of documentation.
The most rewarding part of each of these roles has been working with folks in various plants to solve their problems.
Sometimes that meant dropping everything to go work with Maintenance to resolve an emergency outage; that might include tracking down the latest prints for a machine, troubleshooting wiring, or just holding the flashlight for the mechanic who has already been there for 12 hours.
Other times it meant taking a customer call at 2:00am to get their line up and running.
Sometimes it involved getting on a flight to go assist at a customer site.
I spent over a year working on changeover reduction in a compounding site, working all hours and with all shifts to improve and standardize our changeover processes.
Those are all tactical actions, and they can be rewarding.
Strategically, it’s much more effective to proactively develop systems that make that tactical work much easier.
The technician that needs that print to troubleshoot a machine? It should already be where they can access it. There should be no need to go track it down.
That 2:00am call from a customer? They should have troubleshooting guides, training documents, or built-in system diagnostics to identify and solve the issue more quickly than it takes to make the call.
Almost any manufacturing process must change products; are there standard procedures for how the lines do changeovers? Do they all do it the same? Do they all do it well? If an operator comes from one crew to assist another, can they jump in and do their portion? Is it written down?
That’s a major reason l talk quite a bit about documentation.
Is “documentation” all I do? Absolutely not! But good documentation makes every part of your process work better. And if you do something extremely well, don’t you want to be able to replicate it someday?
The Services tab on this website and Blog # 2 will tell you more about what we can do for you.
William