I joined my first job, from the campus interview, in the biggest engineering firm in India. After the orientation training, I was thoroughly convinced that this is a very high profile engineering company, where I would love to work as an ‘Engineer’.
After the first week of getting posted in the department, I got convinced that I am working as an educated peon – cum – clerk, doing lot of photocopies, filing of heaps of papers, and attending meetings and drafting MOMs and letters.
The next one year was not much different, except that I became very familiar with what was going around in the department. The 2nd year was better when I gradually came to handle different situations, started visiting the various project sites , but there also my job was predominantly checking, submitting , receiving , recording papers / documents in various forms. My bosses were not much different, they were also handling papers, but of higher levels, like offers, technical proposals, negotiations, and so on.
A senior colleague once explained to me, that the jobs we are doing as engineers can be done as well by a boy with 10+2 education, but why the companies select engineers in their ranks is because the Indian students who pass through these 4 year course get inculcated with a sense of discipline, learn some basic technology knowledge, become adept in submitting projects, within deadlines, and in some way become very suitable for execution of assigned tasks. Hence an engineer often fits very well in the service sector also, like the banking industry, software industry, government administration posts etc.
After many years, when I got involved in the world of TPM, started extensively interacting with the Japanese experts and learnt their ways of working in the industry, gradually I started realizing “Engineers” have a different role altogether. The engineering subject is essentially taught to students to give them knowledge of science & technology in the various disciplines. The various products getting manufactured through various machines are actually engineered through a process. The product input, the process conditions, and the product output characteristics are constantly in flux. The job of the engineers is to stabilize these three, and the basic knowledge of the science and engineering is the tool with which they can attack and resolve the problems happening in the processes. Data entry, inspection etc jobs are actually to monitor the deviations, while the real job is to detect the cause and eliminate the cause of deviations. The knowledge of the subject is absolutely essential in handling these challenges. In the Indian industries, tendency of the management and engineers is to rely upon the OEM or the technology supplier to resolve the problem for them. Whereas, the actual role of the engineers is to apply their knowledge and solve the technical problems happening every day in the plant.
Engineers in maintenance need to identify cause of equipment trouble and eliminate the causes. Engineers placed in the project, purchase and other non-manufacturing functions also need to remember their special role. While a purchase clerk can easily do the comparison of offers and select the L1 bidder, the engineer purchaser can go to the technical differentiation among the products offered and select the best option suitable for their plant. The project engineer in execution or supervision, while attending the safety permits and material gate passes, can definitely check the quality of the execution of jobs which do influence the long term stable running of the plants.
Parallely, engineers who are placed in the service sector can also constantly watch the impediments in the smooth flow of various work processes, and can work towards removing the impediments and ‘engineering’ a smooth flow.
An Engineer who works with this understanding of his/her role, will always find enough opportunity to work and bring improvement in the industry’s PQCDS paramaters.
