[Andy Baker]

(wow... this is long... sorry about that)

As an engineer, I've had some highs and lows. The odd thing about it, sometimes the things that you dread actually come out being good experiences. Also, the opposite is true.

I'll first describe what I do at Delphi as a mechanical engineer. Our division of Delphi (the Electronics and Safety division... formerly Delco Electronics) makes automotive electronics. I work in a department that designs and produces production machinery for the assembly lines. Our customers are the production personnel. They come to us with unique assembly and test projects and we create machinery that puts our products together and/or helps the operator put the product together. While our department is in Kokomo, we make equipment for 5-6 other Delphi manufacturing sites.

The neat thing about my job is that I get to work on many different projects and products. I may have 4-5 projects going on at once, for different facilities, or I may be focusing on 1.

Now, to describe a high point and low point of my engineering career, I'll focus on one certain customer in our Milwaukee operations. Let's call this customer "Joe".

About 10 years ago, I was assigned to a project that required a simple mechanism to pick a part from one line and place it on another. This product was an engine control module, about the size of a textbook. I chose to put on a cam-operated indexer (from Stelron) that drove this pick and place mechanism through it's cycle. On the end of the indexer was a simple but strong gripper (from RoboHand). All the machine did was this:

sense a product on lane 1
pick up the product on lane 1
cycle over to lane 2
place the product on lane 2
go back to get ready for another product on lane 1

When the machine was completed, I had to go to Milwaukee to install it and make sure it got integrated into the production line. It was really no big deal. Joe liked the machine and thanked me for a good job. He ribbed me for making a mechanism that appeared to be too large for the job, but he was happy that it worked well.

Fast forward 9 years...

I am working on a robotic pick and place cell, where products come out of an oven and get placed into one of 30 tests nests. The robot sees the parts coming out of an oven, grabs them, places them into these nests. The nests have their own latching/unlatching mechanisms and so does the end of arm tooling on the robot. On the robot head, there are these items: vacuum pickup for label placement, 2 pneumatic grippers for part grasping, 2 pneumatic actuators for nest latching, a tool changer, and a bar code scanner (and a partridge in a pair tree!). On the nests, there are locating pins, shock absorbers, and a Delrin probe nest. The probe nests alone are worth $1,000 (machine time, assembly time, etc.).

We went through the same procedure we always do... design the machine, review it with the customer, make the machine, get it working, ship it to the customer. This machine went to the same customer, Joe, as the cam machine above.

Joe sees this machine, and the first thing he says was "this looks like $#%&". He thought that the tooling holding the nests were wimpy. My boss and I decided to use some extruded aluminum that we deemed robust enough. Our customer wanted machined plates, doweled together. This extruded stuff was not good enough, and he demanded the doweled design. Even though I wanted to go through the hoops to prove that this design was indeed good enough, we were forced to REDO the 30 nest supports, costing many thousands of dollars. Oh... I didn't mention that we were making 8 of this robotic test machine. 2 were already done, and 4 were in process... and this dude was insisting that we can our current design and re-do the nest supports (not a trivial thing at all). I did not think of Joe fondly, as you can imagine.

We did it... redesigned the nest supports and re-installed all of this stuff. The customer was happy, and we essentially were proven wrong. This was a low point, definitely. It is not easy to have your design criticized and you really don't have a chance to prove it works.

So, about a month after we installed the new nest supports and pleased this customer, he sends me an email. This email told the story of a 10 year old assembly line for our "old" engine control module. Delphi didn't need the line anymore, since the part was obsolete and enough spare parts were made. Joe's department finally removed the line from their operations floor. He sent a picture out to all of his co-workers within Delphi, and drew a picture around a simple Stelron cambox.

The note next to the picture said "14,000,000 cycles and not 1 problem ever. We made fun of this "too big" cam box 10 years ago, but it was the most reliable machine we have had since I started here 20 years ago."

That made me proud. I was happy to be a part of something dependable that made someone else's productivity high. Joe is a good guy... he demands excellence and sometimes ticks people off to get it, and I am happy to do my job to make his better.

Andy B.

ps... 1/2 of the day today was spent re-thinking the Delrin nest design that we have made 300 of over the past year... ugh.