Engineer's strengthening role

InTech, Jul 2006 by Hale, Gregory

The era of an engineer noodling for a long period of time over a process control problem is long gone. Now they not only have to fix the problem in seconds to eliminate any kind of downtime, they have to know the business drivers behind the entire process.

In short, they have to become a more active member of the automation team.

"Engineers have to become more engaged in the entire business process, not just their specific area of expertise," said Aubert Martin, president and chief executive of Siemens Energy and Automation Inc. during the Siemens Energy Automation Summit held in Las Vegas in June. "Their job has changed quite a bit over the past five years. Now, there needs to be more entrepreneurial spirit shown by the engineers."

"Engineers are becoming a scarce resource" so their role will change, he said. Their job, Martin said, will now have to take on new, higher challenges than they had before.

"They will have to be more cross functional across other disciplines," Martin said. "The routine engineering work will be outsourced to other countries, but the complex work will be done here. "

Engineers now and especially down the road should be able to work over two or three disciplines. "For example, they should understand flow and motion and mechanical processes," said Martin, who has been running the Siemens Energy business unit for three years.

Hybrid manufacturing

Being cross functional means also being able to work over the traditional process and discrete areas. Once they were considered two vastly different areas, but today, Martin said, "they are practically the same platform. In the past, there were distributed control systems for process manufacturing and programmable logic controllers for discrete. Today, it's possible to have both."

Another new aspect of the engineer's job function is not just looking out a window at their surroundings. Rather, it is knowing how a process moving in TlhTn'a will affect what you are working on here in the U.S. Engineers truly have to become savvier in the ways of business, accounting, and even IT.

One thing engineers will have to become more "familiar with is global applications. They have to understand the global nature of the industry. "

They also should get used to the idea of working globally from a standardized platform worldwide. It just doesn't make any sense any more to have different platforms running in different plants, Martin said, who holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna. This way a standardized platform allows for greater potential for increased productivity, which means a company is producing more product and increasing its profitability. It also allows manufacturers and engineers for that matter to be more flexible and nimble.

At the end of the day, all manufacturers have to think global to keep growing. "At one time, the market here in the U.S. was big enough, but now to sustain growth, companies have to go outside the country," Martin said. "If they don't, someone else will come in and try to win more market share. Successful companies are doing it to drive out the competition."

Matter of trust

Part of winning in a competitive market is running the correct technology and then trusting it will get the job done.

At the end of the day, it is all about software. He said his company has over 30,000 software engineers, which is more than Microsoft. "Without software, you can't do anything anymore."

When it comes right on down to it, you can have all the technology you want. It can have all the bells and whistles and give you data from all over the plant, but Martin said people still play the major role in the whole process. You have to be able to interact with whoever your customer is, Martin said. "It doesn't, matter if you have the best technology; if you don't listen to the customer, then it does no good."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory Hale is the editor of InTech. His e-mail is ghale@isa.org.