Engineering Minds: A sweet-spot for Tech Talent

Engineering Minds: A sweet spot of Technical Talent 

I can confidently wager that innovation and continuous improvement are buzzwords that are overplayed and barely raises eyebrows at meeting tables these days in IT environments. Most experienced tech engineers or specialists have reason to be skeptical of these terms, since they carry a fair amount of their companies’ implied hopes to differentiate themselves in the market and a pressure to drive exponential growth.

However, high hopes get dashed with pragmatic planning and the execution thereof. It is also in these phases that engineering minds come in handy. Yes – electrical, mechanical and even industrial engineers may be very much focused on more traditional industries where they make an impact on tangible processes such as manufacturing, mining, energy and supply chain.

However, they have also been found to be essential team members within Insurance and Financial Services industries where it is their thinking that becomes invaluable in addressing challenges in solving for legacy systems, migration and digitization challenges in these businesses.

Being present at the Southern African Institute for Industrial Engineering’s (SAIIE) annual conference at Spier, this thinking stood out very clearly to me, even among final year, Masters and Ph. D. students. It is a community that questions everything, looks for tiny flaws, applies risks and impacts of all aspects – from systems, business, people and culture to kill each other’s brain children to hone in on what will work.

It is this analytical and ruthless questioning that is valuable for IT teams. Industrial engineers often find themselves in roles they never anticipated and often get caught up in the IT and systems side of a business sporting titles ranging from "BPO Engineer, Continuous Improvement Analyst, Business Analyst, Program Manager, Scrum Master and a whole lot more.

One such example is MMI Holdings’ Sisakunga Pasiya who started in the manufacturing industry, as a ninja in Six Sigma on the removal of waste and improving the quality of product for customers. She shifted to Absa Capital where she identified that an often overlooked link in business improvement projects is to not include technology as a key partner and tool. She then shifted into a role where she took a wide range of challenges as a BA in Data Science.

In Momentum; she automated reconciliations of books to free up the financial team from manual processes and also help them pull relevant reporting. “It was very interesting to see that, even though financial data is not my expertise, my solutions were making sense and proposals were being adopted into the business.

“Now, being a scrum master, my title may sound far removed from what I studied; but it has actually not diverted my focus as an industrial engineer. My primary goal is still effecting continuous improvement in processes and the ways of work in which people collaborate and deliver.”

With Industry 4.0 upping the demand on all of us to be fluid in our work and to be adaptable to business needs – engineering minds have a highly sought-after skill: being able to look at the sweet spot where technology, business and people meet.

Jacques Faure of SAIIE added that: “Industrial Engineering Professionals are instilled with a way of thinking that allows them to function at a highly technical level but also being able to translate that thinking into language that everyone can comprehend, connecting the CIO to COO and even to a CFO. It is an interlinking of operations, technology and even finances to ensure buy-in and the successful implementation of solutions.

“SAIIE is an organisation committed to build a community of members, elevating the practice and quality of industrial engineering, whilst also acting as a key vehicle to showcase the value that industrial engineering, as a profession, can deliver to society and businesses at large.”

Sisakunga ran a workshop at SAIIE on organisational excellence which ties into the range of topical presentations of SAIIE members at Spier from 24 – 26 October to showcase some of her wins at MMI Holdings. It was also an opportunity for MMI’s Industrial Engineering professionals to network, learn and build cohesion around the theme of “Steering the 4th Industrial Revolution”.

At MMI Industrial Engineering, professionals are working across our business to make us leaner and more effective, to effect agile ways of work and work to ever increasing levels of improvement. Our technical managers find Engineering graduates who are able to quickly become T-shaped talent who understand interconnected business units and ecosystems, whilst still being able to do a deep-dive into the tech and processes where needed.

We enjoyed helping to position ourselves as an employer of choice for this in-demand crowd of talent and hope to have some of them join us as future #MomentumMakers.