The more your job looks like a packet, the less it belongs to you. The meeting minutes, the PPAP uploads, the ECO route, the SharePoint CAPA closure. Once the work becomes artifacts and checkboxes, it becomes portable. First to another building, then to a shared-services center, then to a script (see Reason #9 and Reason #33).
You feel it in the tools. PLM gates that anyone with permissions can push. ERP/BOM alignment tasks that live in a queue. APQP deliverables that read like tax forms. Supplier portals that care more about filename rules than design intent. A nonconformance gets three disposition codes and a PDF trail. A DFMEA churns until the matrix stops blinking. None of this requires your badge. It requires availability and patience, which are cheaper in another time zone (see Reason #21 and Reason #24).
Automation enters through the cracks you paved. A macro exports drawings, stamps revision blocks, and repackages PDFs for the portal. A script compares BOMs and raises a ticket. An AI meeting bot writes your action items and drafts the risk slide in your voice. A template swallows lab logs and spits out a test report with the right boilerplate and plots. The more you standardize to survive your load, the easier it is to make you optional.
The plant learns the same lesson. Deviations become dropdowns. FAIRs become uploads. Control plans become clones. When your “design activity” is entering structured data so Quality, Compliance, and Purchasing can see the same rows, the job stops being where you sit. It becomes where labor is cheapest or where compute is free. The remaining “engineering” is calendar triage and stakeholder email, which read well on a rate card and even better as a bot (see Reason #26).
What part of this cannot be moved or scripted? The bracket tweak? The fillet bump? Those live in hour six on Friday, after you have reconciled serial numbers and coaxed the vendor portal past its font error. By then, the interesting part is already elsewhere. Outsourcing follows administration. Automation follows outsourcing. You follow the work until the work no longer follows you.
You will be told judgment cannot be automated. Then judgment will appear as a dropdown.
No comments:
Post a Comment