A day in the life of… a Senior Process & Manufacturing Engineer

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TCT's 'A Day in the Life of...' series has been primarily launched for college and university alumni to better understand what career opportunities in additive manufacturing (AM) are available to them. Throughout the series, TCT will spend time with a host of AM professionals to communicate what their day-to-day tasks are, what kinds of teams they work within, what they have learnt on the job, and how they got to where they are today. In this instalment, GE Additive's Dave Bartosik explains the role of a Senior Process & Manufacturing Engineer. 

Dave Bartosik is stood centre stage, a presentation pointer in hand, as the questions come pouring in.

One keen observer to his workshop, which is detailing the build process analyser capabilities of GE Additive’s Electron Beam Melting (EBM) 3D printing portfolio, is firing question after question to better understand the tools that might one day be at his disposal. Dave is used to this level of interrogation. As a Senior Process & Manufacturing Engineer, he sometimes finds himself at events like this – this being the 2023 Additive Manufacturing User’s Group Conference – where his sales colleagues lean on his expertise to assist prospective customers.

It is just one facet of a job that pulls him from the comfort of a desk to the vibrancy of the factory floor to the bustle of a trade event. Later this afternoon, he’ll occupy his place on the GE Additive stand at the AMUG Conference’s exhibition, and tomorrow he’ll head back to his Cincinnati office to pick up where he left off.

At GE Additive, the Senior Process & Manufacturing Engineer sits within the industrialisation team, with Dave working primarily alongside the company’s EBM technologies, technicians and users.

“I’d say half of my time is on the industrialisation development side, and the other half is getting to tinker around with machines,” Dave says. “It’s an awesome 50/50 split. Half in the office at the desk, and half on the shop floor, fixing things, trying new things, tinkering around.”

Q. What have you learned working this job? 

DB: Basically, everything I know. It’s just physics. That’s all we’re dealing with. Impossible things are possible, you just need to figure out the physics to make it work. It may be incredibly complex, but we’re just playing around with physics.

A TYPICAL DAY

Whether Dave is due to be working from the office or the factory floor, each day starts the same. At 7.30 am every morning, he jumps on a ‘production control call.’ In this meeting, each member of the print operations team comes together to share what’s on their to-do list for today, which tasks they fell behind on the previous day that they need to catch up on, and what they and their team can expect to be working on later in the week.

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At the conclusion of this meeting, Dave opens up his emails. GE Additive being a multinational corporation, with Dave having colleagues in both Sweden and Germany, means there’s always an email or two to respond to first thing in the morning. Once emails are taken care of, Dave might start chipping away at the work instructions he has to compile for users – these documents detail how to prep builds, how to manage files and how to navigate through post-processing as a supplement to the user manual – or he might take care of prints that are due to be completed by noon.

These build jobs are often internal prints, such as fixturing that is used within the GE Additive facilities, or benchmarks for customers, with Dave and his colleagues on-hand to ensure the jobs go to plan and are ready on time. The work instructions, meanwhile, are continuously updated. They include guidance on the best tools to use – such as 'this style of Allen wrench or this torque wrench works better than the off-the-shelf tool' – and step-by-step how-to guides on build prep, build pull and powder management.   

Of course, not every day is the same. It is not unheard of for Dave to get into work and be told he’s needed to lead on some customer training in place of an unavailable colleague. This is where Dave will put the work instruction theory into practice, side by side with a customer. Training can often run for the entire week, with Dave barely able to dip out for any considerable amount of time. In his absence, print operation colleagues will pick up any jobs on Dave's desk.

Q. What kind of people are perfect for a job like yours?

DB: Curious people. Having a good blend of hands-on skills but also technical knowledge. I’m not incredibly technically intelligent – I’ve got a bachelor's mechanical engineering degree, but didn’t get my master’s. But I’m not doing thermal simulation of stresses within parts and things like that either. It’s more on mechanical design and mechanical repeatability, which means you have to have some hands-on aptitude as well.

THE ROLE BEYOND THE TITLE

The remit of a Senior Process and Manufacturing Engineer at a company like GE Additive, put simply, is to help move additive manufacturing forward into industrialisation. To make sure additive manufacturing machinery can repeatably and reliably make parts, it requires people like Dave to define a lot of systems and controls, which are relayed to the user through the work instructions and training programmes.

Dave describes his main goal as ensuring safety, quality, delivery and cost. That is to make sure he and his colleagues are doing the right thing, always, in terms of safety, while keeping an eye out for improvements that could be made. And then making sure that the machines are capable of what they’re intending to make. This, which Dave outlines as the day-to-day priority, requires going through ‘rigorous checklists, MES, design files and build time estimations’ to benchmark the process against their users’ application demands.

“It’s sales enablement,” Dave says. “We’re trying to sell the service of setting up a manufacturing process for our customers so they can take that when they buy their machines and run with what we’ve developed for them.”

Collaboration in a role like this is key, both internally and externally. Through benchmarking, technicians are often supporting each other with customer issues by leaning on their prior experiences to provide solutions. Dave also works closely with the materials team, particularly when trying to customise the material properties that they’re getting out of their EBM machines to specific industries, and the design engineering teams, for although Dave is competent with CAD, the specialists can turn designs around much faster. Externally, Dave is more likely to work with existing customers as opposed to prospective ones, helping them to get to ‘full-blown production’ by offering ongoing consultancy.

Q. Why should someone want to work in the additive manufacturing space? 

DB: Well, you don’t have to, but it’s cool stuff. Every day, there are new things. If you like new, innovative stuff, there’s always new stuff coming out. I don’t think we’re slowing down by any means. It’s a good place to solve new problems.

THE PATHWAY

By his own admission, Dave ‘lucked into’ getting into additive manufacturing. He entered the industry through GE Aviation (now GE Aerospace) as an R&D Engineer pretty much straight out of college. Here, he found himself doing a lot of materials development and parameter development work for new alloys, which would involve manipulating laser powder bed additive machines to ‘do something they weren’t intended for’ for some special alloy case or application. This would help the engineers to understand the ‘ins and outs of the software’, find any existing loopholes, and lock them down to ensure repeatability and consistency.

“At first, I was trying to hack the machines and that turned into ‘how do we make them more consistent and get rid of any kind of variation from weird little quirks?” Dave says.

Dave then moved on to the medical space, working for two and a half years at DRT Holdings as a Senior Manufacturing Engineer – AM. At the time, this company had just a single additive manufacturing machine, but now Dave was focused on production rather than R&D. Working with a couple of different geometries, a very small subtalar implants, Dave would be running up to 200 pieces per build. He also got an introduction to how regulated industries worked, which would serve him well in his next role – Dave re-joined GE in 2017.

Q. If you could give your younger self some career advice, what would it be? 

DB: I wish I would have read and understood more about material science earlier on. I’m still learning a lot about that now. I wish I would have pushed more learnings to that early in college and early career because we’re dealing with materials, various alloys, and various microstructures.

In addition to being fortunate to enter the additive manufacturing space right out of college, there was also some serendipity in his pursuing engineering in the first instance.

During high school, Dave was signed up for concert band class, when the school bumped him up to the higher level one because too many pupils had expressed their interest in participation. His schedule thus got moved around, and there was no longer space for him in his word processing class. They instead suggested he sign up for industrial arts class. Despite joining a week late, he quickly caught up and then raced ahead.

He loved it, went on to do industrial design at college, and swiftly found work at GE, where he is now one of many working to move 3D printing technologies into the manufacturing realm.

“The core of my job now is more based on industrialisation, production, repeatability, which seems kind of dreary, [but] there is still cool innovation every day,” Dave assesses. “This industry, it’s just cool. There are still new things happening, trade shows like this are really cool to see what things people come up with; machines, parts, applications. And so just being around this is pretty awesome.

“I’m pretty fortunate. Everybody I’ve talked to that is not in additive manufacturing [are like] that is the coolest job ever. You get jaded to it, you get used to it, but you have to step back sometimes. What we do is pretty freaking cool.”

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