Solutions Engineer

Position summary

The Solutions Engineer designs the operation.

When a customer needs receiving, storage, picking and shipping to work as one operation rather than as separate pieces of equipment, the Solutions Engineer analyzes their data, maps the process, designs the material flow across every functional area, and produces the concept everything downstream is built from.

The work is industrial engineering applied to a commercial pursuit: order profiles, rates, capacity, labor, and the tradeoffs between them, worked out with the customer and defensible in front of them. The Solutions Engineer hands the Application Engineer a high-level layout with the flow and the rates behind it, and the Application Engineer makes it real.

Staffing test: are we designing the operation, or equipping one that is already defined? A Solutions Engineer engages on greenfield facilities, material flow across multiple functional areas, reconfiguration or process redesign, and any pursuit with customer operational data to analyze. Replacements, expansions, defined-scope RFP responses and repeat scope run without one, and that is the normal case.

Character qualifications

Innovation – We create a culture of relentless improvement of solutions and processes to make every day better.

Integrity – We are open, honest, and committed to giving the straight story every time.

Service – We serve our clients, families, communities, and most importantly our people who are empowered and safe in making decisions and taking actions that dare to make us better.

Ownership – We take full, personal, individual responsibility for our actions and our work.

Essential duties & responsibilities

Intake & qualification

•Give the technical feasibility read on bid/no-bid. The commercial decision sits above this department.

Solution development

•Analyze the customer’s data directly: order profiles, SKU velocity and slotting, volume and seasonality, labor and rate modeling. Establish the rate and capacity basis the solution is sized from.

•Map the process across every functional area in scope and design the material flow that ties them into one operation: routes, buffers, decision points and interfaces.

•Produce the block-level layout by functional area and select the technology class for each.

•Select the third-party partners in the solution where our own product is not the answer. Commodity scope stays generic and goes to execution.

•Evaluate technology feasibility and weigh the tradeoffs between options: cost, throughput, flexibility, footprint and lifecycle.

Customer & supply

•Work in front of the customer alongside Sales as the technical voice on the solution.

•Serve as the primary technical liaison to the customer through the pursuit, presenting and defending the concept and the tradeoffs behind it.

Execution & turnover

•Hand execution a package they can build from: the reasoning and assumptions, not only the drawings.

•Support the Project Manager through the early phases of execution.

Contributes to

○Reviewing the RFP, contract and statement of work for risk

○Protecting the project budget and gross margin

○Applying Fives equipment and configurations to the requirement

○Layout drawings

○Electrical and controls architecture

○The mechanical estimate

○CRD authorship

○Technical writing, description of operation and scope

○Specification compliance and acceptance criteria

○Bid strategy

○Risk assessment

○Vendor and subcontractor evaluation

○The technical basis for acceptance criteria and test procedures

○The standardization program and product classification

Working with the rest of the team

Partner
They bring
You keep

Application Engineer
Equipment selection, detailed layout, manifest, BOM, CRD and the estimate
The flow, the rates, the block layout, and the technology in it

Electrical Estimating Engineer
Controls architecture and the electrical estimate
The operational flow and decision points their controls serve

Principal Solutions Engineer
Cross-discipline design review and final technical authority
The concept on your pursuit

Offering Manager
Proposal schedule, bid strategy, workload prioritization, and who staffs each subsystem
The technical concept and its defensibility

Sales
Commercial strategy, the customer relationship, the bid/no-bid decision
The technical read and the operation the customer is buying

Operations / Project Management
Acceptance criteria, field execution, commodity equipment selection
The technical basis the criteria are built on

Qualifications

Education and experience

•Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering preferred. Engineering or an equivalent combination of education and experience considered.

•8 to 12 years designing automated material handling or distribution operations.

•Required: ownership of facility-level or operation-level concepts spanning multiple functional areas.

•Required: hands-on analysis of customer operational data, including order profiles, velocity, volumes and seasonality, and the rate and capacity modeling built on it.

•Required: direct customer-facing technical experience during a sales pursuit.

•Preferred, not required: material handling, distribution, parcel or baggage experience, and familiarity with AS/RS, goods-to-person, robotics and sortation technologies. Candidates from adjacent automation industries are expressly welcome.

•Familiarity with discrete-event simulation, sufficient to commission and interpret it. Building the models is not required.

•Excel to a high standard. SQL, Power BI or equivalent an advantage. Block-level layout in SketchUp or AutoCAD.

Skills

Language. Reads and interprets customer specifications, operational data, contracts and statements of work. Presents and defends concepts to customers and to senior management. Mathematical. Throughput, capacity and queuing analysis. Applied statistics on operational data. Geometry and trigonometry applied to facility layout. Reasoning. Defines problems, collects data, establishes facts, and draws valid conclusions from incomplete information, stating the assumptions used to get there.

Travel

Travel to customer sites, vendor plants and job sites, typically 25% to 40%. Occasional international travel for site visits or training.

Progression

The Solutions Engineer role has four levels: Junior Solutions Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Senior Solutions Engineer and Principal Solutions Engineer. Senior comes from consistently sound operation design and passing the discipline’s method review, and carries sign-off on others’ concepts along with coaching. Principal holds cross-discipline technical authority. None of these levels manages people. Line management is a separate route, through Supervisor, Manager and Director of Solutions, open by choice rather than by seniority.

Physical demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to use hands to finger, handle, or feel and talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to walk, sit, and reach with hands and arms. The employee is occasionally required to stand and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee must frequently lift and/or move up to 10 pounds and occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, and ability to adjust focus. Travel via automobile and/or commercial airline to customer offices for meetings, vendor’s plants, and job site to coordinate the conveyors or equipment with the building and installers.

Work environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally exposed to moving mechanical parts, outside weather conditions, risk of electrical shock, and risk of radiation. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate, unless performing work in shop or field conditions.