Never forget!

It is heartening to see the creativity in conceptual design, component capability, manufacturing and personnel skills that engineers are bringing to all aspects of our work and recreational pursuits.

Composite materials, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, Industry 4.0, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtual prototyping are huge steps forward in bringing concepts to market at a fast pace - with improved capabilities at lower overall costs. Many successes have been published where these new technologies have made a positive impact on projects when applied correctly.

Expectations of the younger generations entering work and those still in education are for ever more complex and highly-integrated products that replicate and remove the need for human activity. The press and especially social media heavily promote the recognition of such tools and the recognition of engineering as the core of these advances is a great thing. Perhaps worryingly, ‘engineering’ is not the term always used, and yet information technology, communications, gaming, autonomy, and connectivity are only possible through engineering talent.

In recent years, the engineer has been overloaded with non-core responsibilities as corporates downsize, outsource, or cease to replace specialists. Services such as personnel management and recruitment, personnel security, health and safety, and training of others have become part of the engineer’s workload and particularly the engineering managers workload.

Worse still is the absorbing of specialist’s skills as bit parts in the engineers’ job specification. Items such as: configuration management; logistics support; technical documentation; test engineering; project planning and scheduling; thermal and other modelling techniques, and obsolescence management.

Specialist knowledge

Each of these roles has historically been filled by specialist teams with knowledge of customer needs and experience in how to deliver these needs. These skills disappear as older staff retire, and they are not attractive to younger staff joining engineering businesses.

For many organisations, these skills were relics of the old days where these apparent luxuries could be afforded but no longer can be. In most cases the specialist department that did these things was not well recognised, but their demise leads to serious gaps in the development of sustainable and quality products.

As companies move to a new manufacturing and support environment where contracts for availability and capability are common, the lack of these ‘forgotten skills’ can lead to significant risk and programme delay, whilst skills are sought from the marketplace - with a cost premium - or engineers are redeployed from within to investigate and ‘fire-fight’ the overlooked skill with repercussions for the work they were previously doing.

If we look at the obsolescence skills specifically, in the following real-world instances they have caused real issues in the supportability of vitally important assets and infrastructure projects in recent years: analog design engineers; hydraulics and fluid engineering; ‘mature’ software languages; test engineers; logistics technicians; technical publication writers.

Obsolescence management has long been recognised in traditional long-term support sectors such as defence, oil and gas, railways and the nuclear industry, but is becoming increasingly more important as new markets, such as the IoT, industrial automation via the IoT, and connected and autonomous cars.

It will be challenging for these industries to make the required cultural change from proposing and supporting planned obsolescence and moving to a more integrated and public manufacturing and support environment where business partners and consumers will be expecting excellent availability, durability and availability as a service, such as in automated cars for example. Shareholders will also seek assurances of the good ethics of such businesses.

The engineering resources to undertake this transition may be in short supply and premiums to entice people from prestige corporate companies may be considerable.

Personal development

The IIOM is developing professional training for obsolescence practitioners. This work is being supported with dialogue with the Engineering Council and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which will encourage practitioners to carry on personal development to attain Incorporated Engineer (IEng) or Chartered Engineer (CEng) status.

The first level of training - called the IIOM certificate - has been developed as a training course and the first candidates have been trained in the UK and Germany. Successful candidates can use the post nominal letters ‘AIIOM’ after their job title.

The IIOM is currently collecting information from interested parties about the next level being developed, which will be called the Diploma in Obsolescence Management. This will be designed for obsolescence managers and directors.

Please respond to the following short questionnaire to express your interest in finding out more: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/W9VH5YM

So, how do we inform and educate those coming into work from university, overseas or from other jobs, that these ‘old school’ skills are vitally important if you want to build successful products and have happy customers? This requirement has never changed!

www.theiiom.org