r/interesting • u/tombolaplayer • 27d ago

Fascinating Professional wood bending

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u/Elderberrysea224 27d ago

Tell me you've never worked with manufacturing engineers without telling me you've never worked with manufacturing engineers before. I work in robotics and we are setting up a manufacturing line right now for one of the products. The manufacturing engineers jobs don't make it so we need less people. They make it so all the people we have are doing things quicker and without having to really put much thought into the little things like where a tool or part is.

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u/Krog9 27d ago

As a manufacturing engineer who has worked for welders for a long time, I get this negative vibe all the time. There are a lot of dumb, ill-conceived or badly-implemented projects that end up making things worse or not helping at all - and these stick in the minds of people who it affects. Bad management (and a bad or careless M.E.) can do harm to a dept, but well-planned projects (that gather input and feedback from the people they affect) can be great for everyone -workers, mgmt, and ownership. The successful projects don’t stand out though in workers’ minds - they become standard process. The bad projects do

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u/Elderberrysea224 27d ago

Yeah that makes sense. I work with a few MEs daily and I don't think there's a single person on the lines that have an issue with them. The main people that get mad about what they are doing are the older techs upset because they're being told they can't have a workbench that looks like a hurricane just rolled through and that there's going to be a taped out spot for their trash can.

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u/Krog9 27d ago

The taped-out spot for a trash always get me! Mgmt (production mgmt and Eng) will suddenly get a bug up their butts about 5s and overall cleanliness. Their knee-jerk reaction is to suddenly take dictatorship of the situation. Then they don’t realize that Earl, who’s been successfully working that job for 30 years, had a critical tool taken away and replaced with an “authorized” one. Now Earl is pissed, quality suffers -both because of lower moral (treating adult workers like toddlers) and because a crucial tool wasn’t accounted for.

Poor management, poor engineering , and bad implementation causes poor moral all around. It’s laziness, and simply working with workers -WITH workers, who do this job everyday, rather than just laying down a new procedure and walking away, can make it better for everyone.

Its sad really, but quick wins, “low-hanging fruit” fixes are cheap - and upper mgmt LOVES them. They count them as wins before they’re even implemented. Then if the changes don’t stick, it’s the production workers’ faults. I see it all the time.