Department Highlight - Product Engineering

by Archie England - 

This month I will be spotlighting a department that has a lot of daily interactions with many departments in the company. So, you will likely know their faces, even if you may not know what they do.
The Product Engineering department is responsible for creating the technical information that manufacturing needs to build the units to our customers' specifications. They have to coordinate a lot of information, connect a lot of departments, create 3D models of the parts that make up our units, generate the parts lists (Bill of Materials), prepare the cut lists, help monitor the units as they are built, and many more tasks!
Here are some statistics that may be surprising to you:
The parts list (Bill of Materials) for a single order / unit that runs down our assembly line may contain over 1,700 line items! Usually, over 500 of those parts we manufacture ourselves.
Each part that we manufacture also includes routing information (details of how it is manufactured) which typically includes at least 5 lines of additional information, which means 1,500 more lines of data that are needed.

The engineering information package for each unit may be made up of over 135 pages of drawings and parts lists. This does not include all of the routing information mentioned above.
These numbers do not even include some sub-assemblies that are attached, like drawer sets / DuaLocks and cranes! Whew!

Naturally, they have some tools to help with this massive undertaking. However, they still have to make sure that it is all correct and orderly. All of this means that they are a very busy group, with a lot of responsibilities!