Being in the field for 30 years, in 4 different industries has given me a pretty good overview of the field of Manufacturing Engineering. Granted it has been all in Southern California which is probably it’s own culture base but there is probably significant similarities between other geographical areas in those industries.
I’ve worked in defense, aerospace, medical devices (classes 1, 2 and 3) and commercial industry as a manufacturing engineer and in management. I particularly like it because it has allot of variety and is defined differently in all of those industries. Not only is there variety in how it is defined by industry but within the job itself there is allot of variety of job responsibilities. Without getting into too much detail of the tasks, you can work with product support with assemblers and technicians all the way to making presentations to top management for new equipment or even the purchase of buildings.
But yesterday in a discussion with an employee, she said that it appeared that management didn’t understand why they needed manufacturing engineering and she felt that they just wanted her to disappear. She makes herself useful by making her skills visible to other leaders in the company but to her immediate management, it is transparent. She is the invisible employee, doing the things that need to be done but without recognition. She takes up the slack for Engineering doing the things that aren’t very challenging or exciting – finishing up the cables, identifying adhesives, setting up label machines, fixing machines when they break and writing instructions that other groups have failed to do.
In the meantime, they have added other groups to take up the responsibilities for the design transfer – New Product Introduction and Operations Project Management. But what place does Manufacturing Engineering have in these groups?
It begs the question, what is Manufacturing Engineering?
Is it just picking up the slack for everybody else?
Is it leading the pack to make sure that the new designs are being built correctly and efficiently?
How much of it involves sociology and anthropology and psychology? My definition of sociology is going to “connecting to the whole” and anthropology is “connecting to the past”.