Confessions of a food engineer

The design we do today is conceptual design, process flow. In an earlier life, we designed actual equipment. Today we are technology brokers between business units within our company or between our company and the equipment companies. We are the conduits.

Drawings are hard to read. We spend a lot of time translating what the plant needs, translating the technology and converting it back to a format and language that people in the plant can understand.

Understand that the plant workers do not see what you’re working on as a project. They see it as an operation. A project is a means to an end, not an end itself. We are helping our organization to develop a capability it didn’t have before.

You are not in the project business. You’re in the meat business or the baking business or the dairy business. I think more engineers realize this today. That’s one of the marks of our maturity.

At the heart of the job is capital spending. I am responsible for planning a project, communicating that plan, executing that plan. I work on the capital appropriation and the cost justification.

I also spend a lot of time training people to do this. Not many of them are engineers. A lot of people in other departments with master’s degrees are picking up work that engineers used to do. These are smart and energetic people, eager to learn. They are hard working and capable.

Training makes up a lot of what I do today. I coach guys on how to write a proposal. I help them write a CER (capital expense request), explain the strategy, help them select the words appropriate to the request. Today, the role is more one of oversight and coach to the younger folks – women and men who may not be engineers.

One fellow has been with me for several years. In the last two years he has handled $1.5 million in project work and managed a dozen projects. He has had CAD (computer-aided design) training and now project management experience. He knows how to schedule projects, and he assigns tasks. But he’s not an engineer. He knows how to find other people to fill in the gaps in his training and ability.

Our organization challenges young people. One young woman in our organization is very bright. She listens and learns. She has no engineering training and has never bent any metal, but she has good skills and a good brain. But, without a mentor, she would not be able to do the job.

In the mid-1990s, as engineering downsizing was becoming the trend, the most conspicuous void in the industry was the absence of mentors. “Who is going to teach the young engineers?” we wondered. “Who is going to show them the ropes?” With so few engineers now, we have to mentor! We have no choice but to teach. Necessity is a marvelous persuader.

My value to the organization is my experience. A lot of guys like myself have been forced out of the food industry. That’s a lot of experience walking out the door. Who’s going to coach and train these people after me?

You see, I don’t manage projects anymore. I manage the process of managing projects. Out of six people working on projects for our company, only one is an engineer. One has computer design training. The other four are bright and technically minded, but they don’t know what questions to ask.Yet.

From metal bender to line design to project management to managing project management…to teacher. That pretty much sums up how the job has changed.

Marketing projects

Selling a project within your company is critical today. Money is tight; capital is restricted. So we’ve learned to get more creative on projects. We can get projects done with less capital than in the past.

I know how to market a project, how to sell the organization on the appropriation. My value is in translating strategy, taking ideas and putting them down in ways that make sense. You have to make “business” come out of a project.

A project proposal should say “this is a good business investment because…” This is tough for those who haven’t been down this road before. You have to understand that the people who give us money don’t care about the project. They care about the business!

You are competing for capital within your organization. The better projects wind up on top of the pile. But what characterizes the better projects? They are better because you have made a better case or provided the better economic justification.

It’s all about sales!

In four years, I have never had a capital appropriation turned down. My success is a combination of engineering training, experience and judgment. We study, we plan, we take our shot.

But that’s not how everyone does it. For some, the pattern is “Ready, shoot, aim.”

A couple of years ago, an engineer left the company in the middle of a multi-million dollar project. I took over.

I couldn’t transfer the job to someone else because I had no one there to give it to. I had the experience and could interpret what needed to be done. I had to put on my shoulder pads and leather helmet.