Role Description
As a factory process engineer you will be responsible for ensuring our processes perform reliably whilst working to improve efficiency and reduce waste. You will need to develop a key understanding of the products and processes we use and the running conditions of your production line. Your role will require you to think analytically about problems and find innovative solutions. Your task may be incremental improvements over a period of time or a solution to address more immediate production problems.
This will mean working with the production team to understand the issues and apply your engineering knowledge to find a solution. It is also important your ideas and initiatives are effectively communicated to technicians and sponsors in order to see your input translated into our factories and our products
The process engineer’s key accountability is to provide the engineering skill in the event of issues and assist with long term improvement agendas. You will also get to work with project engineering colleagues when commissioning new equipment into existing systems.
Profile: Factory Process Engineer – Kate McConnell
"My first factory based role was working at one of the key feedstock's factories in Chirk, Wales. As a site process engineer I was involved in all sorts of development and improvement projects as well as daily troubleshooting and monitoring of process parameters. I was expected to quickly obtain a detailed understanding of the production process by talking to shift managers, operators, maintenance engineers and other production colleagues. I attended daily production meetings and was responsible for following up process related issues or incidents. Anything from arranging the commissioning of new instrumentation, to identifying the cause of high end specification product. Alongside daily production tasks I was assigned to an improvement project focusing on a process bottleneck. I worked with equipment suppliers, shift managers, project engineers and operators to improve performance and throughput. I also designed and carried out several studies to better understand the chemical processes occurring in production. The results of the studies were used to make recommendations for future improvement projects.
"I really appreciated being given the opportunity to work so closely with the factory early on in my graduate career, it gave me a great insight into how a production site works and daily challenges faced. It's something you can only learn by doing and I have drawn on those experiences in other roles where even a basic understanding of production has been invaluable."