I am a mechanical engineer. My day is spent as follows:
20% dealing with requests generated from customer service/sales, either for product improvements or technical documents. Some of these product improvements are large enough in scope that they become projects, others (Can I get it in blue?) are small enough they can be handled with a single document called an Engineering Change Request, that I submit to Document Control.
20% is dealing with our inspection department. Best case, this is spent approving First Articles (that is, samples of the first parts off a new tool that a supplier makes) with no defects. Worst case, it's dealing with Inspection Rejection Reports, where a part doesn't meet some section of the requirements, either because a dimension is out, it doesn't meet rated strength, or the paperwork is wrong. I have to either determine that the parts are acceptable and update our drawings to reflect that, temporarily allow a deviation (if our inventory is low, usually) to accept the parts but require a new first article next time we buy from that supplier, or the dreaded RTV--return to vendor, do not pay.
40% of my duties are new product development projects--doing everything from high level conceptual design ('what features do we want?') to down and dirty solid modeling (although I have designers that do most of that work for me). I also coordinate ordering and testing of the prototypes, and oversee the whole ramp-up for production. I usually only have one or two major projects at a time, and their scope is 6-18 months each.
Until recently, 20% of my duties was handling line defects...production would have an assembly that wasn't going together, and I would have to troubleshoot it, find the reason, if the reason was a part, fix it, if the reason was a process, update it, if the reason was a design, change it. We now have a manufacturing engineer (again), so this part of my duties should be offloaded.
Finally, lately, I've had 20% or so responsibility with Continuous Improvement, specifically 'Kaizen' events. Once every other month (there are four of us, events are held twice a month and we rotate), I lead a week long seminar going into extreme detail on some process, like our shipping area, or our Change Request process, etc, and we analyze all the waste in the process, and setup a future state process. This has been pretty interesting thus far, it's an interesting problem-solving challenge.
So...yeah. That's what I do. I have worked two other companies, and most engineers seem to have a similar work load, although the percentages can vary, and some infrastructures make people specialize more.
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twisted no more
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