Optimation Blog

Back in the 70s when I graduated with an engineering degree, a large percentage of the new graduates went to work for manufacturing companies.  A certain percentage went on for advanced degrees and ended up in research positions and academia, but much of the research was carried out by private companies building their own IP portfolios.  The exception to this was civil, structural and architectural graduates who might end up working for private engineering and design firms. 

How do you work on the most stimulating and meaningful engineering and manufacturing projects across a wide variety of applications without working directly and exclusively for one of the world's biggest manufacturing companies?  Work for a firm that services those companies and participate in select projects that are sourced to your firm.

A phrase that often gets used when projects go awry is "unintended consequences." On the surface it's a simple-enough statement, declaring that there were outcomes to some actions taken that (usually) ran counter to the intent of the project, and generally they were not desired.  In other words, "some bad things happened that we did not expect."

“We’ll take away your pain!”

That is one of our favorite tag lines here at Optimation.  We have many customers that come to us with different problems, but the bottom line is they are experiencing “pain” of some type – facility shutdowns, short-staffed internal teams, looming capital improvement budget deadlines, custom testing requirements for safety and quality, and many more. We are here to take away that pain!

We’re approaching the fourth quarter and companies are beginning to do their year-end planning.  As systems integrators and fabricators, we find it interesting to see how the results of this planning are played out in different years for different clients.  Depending on their analysis and plans it can mean feast or famine for companies like ours.  It’s hard to know if they all use the same set of rules and just have different circumstances or if different companies have completely different criteria for what they do. 

The procurement processes at many companies can be very complex and time consuming.  It can take longer to get a purchase order than to complete the work on some projects. One solution to this is to set up an engineering services contract, or a blanket contract.

Creating a blended team to provide engineering services is a best practice of bringing on and integrating new people into an organization. 

Many of our clients look to hire one of our employees as an embedded resource at their facility. This work could be anything from being a part of the customer’s project team, to being an on-call resource to do whatever is required onsite, or as an engineering consultant.