I have always had an enjoyable job as every day was a new adventure to work with new challenges. This is just an ordinary day in an industrial engineer’s workplace life, updated January 2024.
That is not to say that it’s free from other pressures and demands on your time & skill.
Learning to cope in this industrial engineer’s environment early in your career, will help award you with great achievements and self-satisfaction over many years.
You are given problems to solve and, in most events, the complete resources to accomplish your task are made available to you.
In other circumstances, they are not, and you must go out & hire the tools you need or make them yourself, as this may be a one-off development that you have to do.
You may even have to invent tools and methods before you start the job in the first place…!
Industrial Engineers
It may take you minutes to sort out or months, you never know what lies ahead of you from day to day! You may be working on your own or as part of a team. But mostly you are going to make other people’s workload easier, faster or even change the whole process altogether.
Generally, many of your tasks will ultimately be to cut costs for the overall process, to help keep the company in a top-class competitive position in their industry.
I have been involved with some great projects that were to help make the company that I worked for very successful. One such project was with roller coverings in the early 1980’s.
A foreword here;
In this era, many industries did not share information with each other! The only way to get advanced technical know-how was to read books in special technical libraries around the country. Or alternatively, attend colleges or universities that run courses in the main subjects that were of interest to you.
In these settings, you would rub shoulders with like-minded people and often pick up snippets of information in the most casual of instants that would later turn out to be of great value. This was a huge expense on any one individual. If your company did not support you to cover the costs of such special courses or workshops!
Because of my desire to rapidly expand my knowledge I took the latter course of action first and later took many long weekends in special libraries studying my subject. This was to lead me to achieve great personal value and advancement in my technical knowledge in this industry.
The Project
The project was a simple task as far as top management were concerned…? Namely; can we leave the glue rollers running in this special type of glue that was specifically formulated for a particular job?
By being in a position were the rollers could coast overnight and between order changes. Would reap great cost savings for the company and not to mention the increase in productivity!
In the beginning, this special glue was used for a one-off order only. So the complete system had to be washed down thoroughly before setting up for the next job.
This wash-down procedure took two men about 4 hours to do it properly, without any shortcuts been taken! Otherwise the next order up, using a different type of glue, would become contaminated and not flow smoothly, but go to gel in the glue trays.
( This happened many times!)
With the result, that the whole job had to be done rapidly again..! If this happened in the late afternoon there would not be many volunteer operators, to stay on the job after their shift ended, to see it completed…
This situation would lead to big problems for the production schedule of that day…! And sometimes the next few days, while operators would try to catch up for loss production time due to the extra required cleaning.
The Trials
After many trials on a small pilot machine that I made and set up, which meant that I only needed minimal space and resources to experiment with on this project. The rollers I used were short, as this was a narrow pilot machine, so they could be recovered at very short notice.
I enjoyed a good working relationship with many roller-covering companies and their workshop personal. As I would visit them and explain my problems first hand.
Then they would explore new covering material formulations. Carry out their work and cover the next set of rollers for me.
I should also add here, at very low cost to the company and more importantly with no interruption to production what so ever!
After going with many combinations of different types of roller coverings and compositions I finally ended up with a composite covered roller in the glue tray and a steel roller with a chrome finish as the application roller.
With the use of electronics, meant that I could vary the surface speed of the application roller to the line speed of the web, to give a wiping action. And vary the speed of the metering roller to the application roller speeds.
This was Top Secret information at the time…
PS, This method proved extremely profitable to run in production on many products for years to follow!
Job done…! Time taken 10 months.
Now it was time to have new rollers made for the first production machine, in their new special coverings and chrome finished. So when I got the cost of the new rollers and presented them at a full management meeting.
In the new boardroom all hell broke out over the costs required to replace the old style rollers with the new improved rollers…!
Every excuse under the sun was presented before me, as to why this was a bad move…! the wrong way to go, would be a waste of time and money…?
“How will we keep up with production while these rollers and controls are fitted”! And what, if for some other reason they don’t work as expected…?
In the end, one senior manager give me full backing to go ahead with the upgrade.
Time To See The Results
Within a few months, everybody was so pleased with the results that they were asking for all other similar machines in the factory to be upgraded ASAP…!
What a turn around to experience the sense of achievement that occurred next time I was in the same boardroom. To be told that the company’s profits were up and continuing to increase…!
Then shortly afterwards followed by, what’s next on your list of upgrades or improvements…?
But sometimes, you know how it is, you can have an off-day…?
N.B. {I have continued to enhance this technique, to improve the quality of the products run on various machines ever since on all new or improved gluing applications}
Who are the people that make a real difference
Some have said that I have the dream job…?
Well immmmm..! YES..?
See what other people have got to say, then you can judge for yourself.
Flute Rollers for Single Facer
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Talk to you soon!
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One thought on “Industrial Engineers We Can Make a Difference?”
Good morning Guys,
You have a very nice website, I love the machine photos you have in your Photo Gallery.
Looks like you have a great time doing your work-?
Cheers,
JT.
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