Engineering Manager - Assembly Technology

Summary

• Target Department: Sustaining & Modification Engineering (Conveyance Systems)
• Primary Focus: Team leadership, sustaining engineering, standard modifications (MODI), production support, cost innovation, and regional/global supply localization support.
• Key Interfaces: Main technical liaison to the MODI Team (Germany) and the Application Engineering Team (USA).

Role Purpose & Goal

The Engineering Manager for Mechanical Conveyance (Sustaining & MODI) is responsible for leading, mentoring, and developing a highly skilled engineering team focused on the lifecycle management, local manufacturing support, and customization of mechanical conveyance systems.

Your mission is to maintain a seamless technical bridge between developers, purchasing, manufacturing, and global partners.

You will ensure standard products are modified efficiently under the MODI framework, production lines remain operational without technical bottlenecks, and products are continually optimized for cost and local sourcing.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development

• People Management: Direct, coach, and inspire a multidisciplinary mechanical engineering team.
• Define clear roles, target expectations, and capacity plans.
• Culture Carrier: Foster a continuous learning environment, feedback culture, and innovative thinking.
• Resource Management: Manage team capacity and technical competency matrices to support ongoing production and pipeline requests.

Global Interface & Collaboration

• German MODI Team: Serve as the primary technical and process interface to the central MODI team in Germany to ensure standard design guidelines and engineering changes align with core global standards.
• US Application Team: Work in lockstep with the US Application team to understand customer-specific requirements, translating regional field inputs into localized engineering changes.
• Production Support: Act as the first line of engineering escalation for the localized production plant, ensuring quick issue resolution, safety compliance, and minimum downtime.

Sustaining & Customization (MODI) Engineering

• Modification Architecture: Oversee the mechanical modification and design changes of standard mechanical conveyance assemblies to meet client-specific layouts.
• BOM & SAP Control: Ensure high-quality execution of BOM (Bill of Materials) setups, configuration management, and the release of engineering changes in PLM/SAP databases.
• Change Management: Implement structured engineering change management (L3) processes to keep drawings, documentation, and tooling synchronized.

Cost Innovation & Local Sourcing

• Cost Innovation Design: Champion "Design-to-Cost" (DTC) and Value Engineering initiatives on existing product lines to reduce material and manufacturing costs.
• Supply Localization Support: Act as the technical partner to the localized purchasing/procurement teams.
• Support local vendor qualification when needed, review technical capabilities, and validate raw material or component substitutions without compromising quality and safety.

Main Tasks & Activities

• Lead and coordinate day-to-day sustaining engineering work packages and local customer custom-modification requests.
• Synchronize regularly with the DE MODI and US Application teams through structured joint reviews to maintain cross-border alignment.
• Analyze value streams and production feedback to close the development loop, applying learnings to future standard product updates.
• Evaluate and sign off on mechanical designs, tolerance analyses, and material selection for cost-reduction initiatives.
• Support technical auditing of new localized supplier parts to facilitate smooth component localization and purchasing success.
• Report department performance, engineering release status, and cost-saving metrics to the Department Head.