Manufacturing Automation – Innovate with a cross industry team

“And that’s how aeronautical engineers solve their problems.” was Professor N’s closing statement as he concluded reviewing a fluid dynamics problem with the class.

While still remembering this moment in that class, it didn’t mean very much at the time.?After all, we were still using the same calculus we were using in Thermodynamics, the same governing equations structure we were using in Strength and Materials class and the same problem solving methodology we were using in all the classes and since we were in the Mechanical Engineering program, not the Aeronautical Engineering program, it didn’t make much sense or at least didn’t give any insights.

Years later, after having visited dozens of manufacturing plants and designed/built equipment for a variety of industries I made a connection, which may or may not have been the meaning of Professor N’s statement, but still holds.??

In visiting these many facilities, one gets to see many systems, unique to that industry application but using common principles and executed differently to solve the same problem.?Most often this is due to a particular industry’s requirements, unique safety considerations, unique regulatory constraints, unique financial constraints and most important, the collective “building on” sequence of that particular industry’s engineers who successively mentor and learn from those that came before them.

So if one is designing an actuator in the food industry, it might need to be constructed so that it can withstand harsh spray applications for cleaning and that requirement flows through to the materials used, the bearings used, the general forms and shapes to eliminate the possibility of pooling of cleaning and other fluids, the types of acceptable fastening methods used, the innate design of how that has been solved long ago in that industry and is "the way it's done", etc. etc.??

Similarly, a medical device manufacturing assembly process, a pharmaceutical process line, a PCB assembly line, a “dirty” metal working process or a clean room assembly process, each have their unique machine design requirements that necessitate designing that same actuator in either a slightly different or a radically different way to meet those requirement, whether environmental, functional, extreme attribute constraints, (package size, weight, heat dissipation, etc.), and once again, even simply conforming to the best design practices that have evolved and have been transmitted from designer to designer in that particular industry.??One can also observe these variations of solutions to common problems by visiting industry specific trade shows where similar or identical problems are solved in different ways … in some ways quite innovative if the observer is not from that industry.

While not a rule per se, each industry typically hires engineers from that same industry and conversely engineers move from one company to another within the same industry as that both minimizes on-boarding and training efforts but also builds on the “comfort zone” of everyone using the same language as well as “hitting the ground running”.??

All well and good and this assures that everyone in that industry is pretty much at the same level with little chance of learning something new that if applied to this industry, can be innovative! ?After all, while Joe in the yogurt packaging plant across the industrial park is an excellent machine designer and is looking for a new role, he won’t apply for that senior machine designer role we’ve advertised here on LinkedIn and even if he does, the algorithm will weed him out as we’ve specified, “Electronics packaging equipment experience Required!”

Short of sending all our engineers to all industries trade shows and constantly scanning the various offerings and designs, the industry has in part filled this need for “cross-pollination” of a variety of solutions to common problems by using Systems Integrators who design and build equipment for various industries and who innately often integrate the various “learnings” from the several industries they service.?Still, that may not be enough to create innovative solutions that can become a competitive advantage for a particular company’s process by integrating subtle but not common for that industry solutions.

One way to, at least in part, accomplish this is to build an in-house team that is composed of multi-industry experience engineers so that a fuller menu of possibilities of how to solve a particular equipment design problem can be considered.?Not proprietary information of course, but “best practices” developed in different industries that can be “stitched” together in an interdisciplinary way into a novel embodiment that perhaps increases performance, dramatically reduces footprint, simplifies maintenance or in some other “Economically Significant” way, creates an Innovative solution that’s translated into a competitive advantage.

If this can be accomplished, we will have leveraged common practice in one industry into a unique solution in our industry!

In Summary:

While necessitating perhaps a longer on-boarding and training process, building a machine design and integration team that’s composed of competent, interdisciplinary and multi-industry experience yields unexpected and not easily quantified Innovations in the development of unique-to-the industry equipment and process development.??This is accomplished by tapping into the erstwhile inaccessible pool of “best practices” from a different industry which has, for unique reasons of that industry, developed common-to-that-industry, yet relatively unknown in our industry, designs and methods that can be readily ported and applied in our application, in a way that provides a competitive advantage.

This “cross-pollination” seldom happens organically as engineers typically stay within their industry and if this potential reservoir or innovation is to be tapped … it takes a conscious effort to build this type of a team!

What has your experience been in working in or with, a diverse engineering team from different industries backgrounds? ?

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