In the second of our 'My Engineering Career' series, Morgan Bonici, EngX community member and Chairman of the IET France Network tells us about his career journey and his current role as a Project Manager in the optics industry:
Who I am and what I do
My name is Morgan Bonici, I’m a project manager and I have been an engineer since 2010, so for just over 14 years.
I work in optics, which means manufacturing lenses, the design of optical components for medical and defence applications as well as for visuals and imaging. Think binoculars, microscopes, camera objectives and lasers rather than spectacles.
The company I work for is US based, with factories and sales offices throughout the world. We are the biggest catalogue optics provider in the world and also do custom components and designs for our customers.
Bad eyesight, good career move
As a child, I was happiest playing with my stickle bricks before trying out lego technic sets. I then became passionate about aircraft and wanted to be a pilot for the Royal Air Force. Unfortunately, my astigmatism had other plans so having been chewed out by the RAF Pilot Scholarship program, I thought, hey, maybe I can at least help make planes if I cannot fly them myself. So, I started my degree in Aerospace Engineering.
The numbers don’t add up
I got into this through clearing after finding my Maths A-Level grade left a little to be desired. The course was tough but very interesting. Again though, I was having issues with the Maths. Anything I could visualise was great, but when we got into the more abstract maths, I really struggled. I graduated and then moved to a Masters course on Materials Engineering where I found a better fit for myself.
Once I graduated, at the height of the credit crunch, I found it tough to get a job. I ended up interviewing for a company making optical fibre coupled lasers, and that was the start of my journey in optics.
Not what you’d expect
Engineering it turns out, is not all about Maths and Physics. You are not always wearing a hard hat and given a blank piece of paper and told to design a new ‘thing’. A lot of the work is modifying existing designs to fit applications and making incremental changes to something to improve its cost or manufacturability.
I found quite early that being well educated was only part of it. It was useful for things like doing calculations and dreaming up a design, but it was for almost naught without a production engineer who came from the line to tell you how your beautiful theoretical design, which undoubtedly would work amazingly well was completely unmanufacturable.
Later on, I found myself in positions where I would be working with some very clever individuals who could do calculations in their heads that I wouldn’t even be able to start with a calculator, but would be completely stuck if a red light flashed up on the machine.
At other times, a critical part of the job is explaining engineering concepts to non-engineers - be it to sales, management or a customer. This is a completely different ball game to having an engineer-to-engineer discussion.
Engineers, come in all shapes and sizes, and you usually need a few to compliment each other in order to get something to work. Also, and this is important, the customer can very much be wrong sometimes.
Shocking test results
Challenges I’ve faced have largely been people based rather than technical. I find that usually for me the challenge is often about pulling different stakeholders within manufacturing, sales and the customer, with different desires and expectations, to the same understanding.
Even so, one of my early projects I am most proud of involved a case where part of a scope for a military application (which we had been manufacturing for a year) started failing spectacularly - as in a lens would disintegrate in the assembly at the customer end during shock testing.
As quality engineer I reviewed the parts in production, and by chance noticed that one of them clunked when I moved a tray of objectives. We took apart the part and found the lens in question - glued into place with a ‘squidgier’ adhesive specifically to reduce shock - was actually slightly off from the bottom of the housing. This meant it would hit the housing when tapped or shocked, which would lead to the eventual destruction of the lens in the objective.
Just tap it…
I travelled to the customer site and performed a 100% tap test to isolate the affected parts at the customer site in order to allow the good parts to keep being used while we isolated the cause.
Returning to the factory, I led the effort to find the root cause which we found to have been the wear on some of the inserts we were using to place the lens in the objective for gluing. This was confirmed when we itemised the jigs and checked the objectives based on which set of jigs were used and found that all of the problem parts came from two (out of a dozen) sets of jigs. We implemented a usage lifetime on each of these jigs to be replaced periodically. The tap test remained as part of the testing regimen moving forward.
Engineering a compromise
A lot of what I do involves finding creative compromises to break a deadlock between, say, the factory and the customer. This can come in the shape of a customer having an overly tight specification on a part which makes it expensive or difficult to manufacture or, more often, both. Then I have to discuss with the customer what the potential alternatives are.
Recently, for example, a customer had required a lengthy inspection process on each individual component for what was otherwise a fairly normal high-volume part. This caused a high cost at the factory because of the time taken to perform, it as well as creating a bottleneck affecting throughput.
The workaround I found, was that when we did the standard measurement on the batches of parts, we would take the part with the highest and lowest value as well as a median part to run the full tests on. This meant that instead of testing hundreds of parts, we only had to test three. The customer accepted this and the matter was resolved.
Making myself useful
Parts I have made have gone into medical equipment which helps perform surgery or detect Covid-19. Parts I have made have been used to shoot films we can enjoy watching in cinemas or at home on streaming platforms. Parts I have made have gone into military systems which have seen extensive use recently as can be seen in the evening news.
I am proud of working in the optics industry and of the improvements a good optical system can have in improving manufacturing processes, in seeing and detecting things such as in an emergency collision avoidance system for a self-driving car or to help tracking carbon and other emissions from space.
Some of it does go towards applications which are more difficult to rationalise as a good contribution to society. You can tell yourself that it is a necessary evil, or that you make the part that guides a weapon to a legitimate target rather than the orphanage next to it and not the part that causes the destruction itself. You can tell yourself also that you are helping people defend themselves from invasion or by shooting down missiles aimed at their cities.
In the end, a lens is a lens.
Making myself a better engineer
I am now in a position which is less about engineering in itself and more about managing engineers. I have thus been working on my skills in project management (PRINCE2) and am considering pursuing an EMBA.
I work to keep up to date through reading articles in optics industry magazines and attending webinars as well as having the odd sit down with our engineers more directly involved in the technical aspects.
Through the IET, I have more broadened my knowledge in fields, that I am not directly working in, through seminars, visits and tech talks in other disciplines.
Running before I can walk – Professional Registration and me
Whilst I am registered as an Incorporated Engineer, it has not directly affected my career. In the words of my Professional Registration Advisor, I had the awful bad manners of getting promoted to a project management role before having done enough engineering to warrant chartership.
Crossing continents, using languages, doing engineering
Up to now, I have stayed in the Optics industry throughout my career. I started as a mechanical design engineer designing fibre coupled lasers in the UK. My ability to speak French to our French customers was largely behind my move to Singapore to become a quality engineer.
Later, I moved to a project management role in the same company, looking after challenging parts for challenging customers.
I changed company in Singapore, finding myself leading the quotation team and first article activities at the factory. Recently, I transferred to the office in France where I work as a project manager looking after European accounts.
Skills to engineer success in engineering
Your technical skills are what will get your foot in the door especially when you start. Following which, you will build your experience and your reputation in the industry.
Communication is key when you have to balance the needs of different stakeholders and to soothe egos. Creativity to find out-of-the-box solutions to a conundrum has also been very useful. Even if the idea might sound silly, it can make people reconsider their preconceptions and thus find a new avenue to look into.
The ability to take risks, and take the consequences of said risks, is also critical especially when dealing with cultures (regional cultures or work cultures) which are risk averse because it helps keep things moving. A customer used to joke that if they needed something done, they had to come to me then things would start moving, not necessarily in the right direction but they would move.
Once you have your technical base, it is your soft skills and your network that will serve you best.
It’s good to talk
It was my first manager who suggested I join the IET and start working towards professional registration. He and my first colleagues showed me the ropes as it were, and got me started on my engineering journey. Moving to Singapore, I had a good relationship with many colleagues who helped me better understand the lens manufacturing aspects and quality systems. A manager from a different department became my unofficial mentor and helped guide me at times when I struggled on something.
In Singapore, I became involved in the IET Singapore Network, where I rose from YP to eventually chairing the Network. It had little direct impact on my career beyond increasing my breadth of experience in other fields, by attending technical talks as well as soft skills like public speaking and management of the network.
Listen to people who want to help
I joined my first company after a former course mate gave me a heads-up that they were hiring technicians. Halfway through the interview, the engineering manager popped his head in to ask me if it was true I could do CAD. I replied I had taught half the class how to use it, and to ask my course mate. I was hired as a design engineer instead of a technician.
Later, in Singapore, my mentor (who was leading another department) gave me the leg up to Project Manager after suggesting I might be better suited to that role.
With the cost of living increasing in Singapore especially for a foreign family with a young child, I spoke to my boss to see what options there would be for me. He is the one who suggested an internal transfer back to Europe and supported the move.
…and keep your integrity
For me, my main bit has been integrity. I built trust with colleagues, customers, everyone. I have not always been tactful and had to learn diplomacy the hard way, but once you have a reputation for being trustworthy and speaking plainly, people start seeking you out rather than the other way around.
If you’re starting your career…
At work, I have had a couple of junior engineers reporting to me including one I hired myself. Generally, there seems to be some disillusionment when coming out of university and into a work environment as the work can often be more spreadsheets than assisted reality. My advice is to keep learning, build your experience and to keep an eye out for ways they can make a change or improvement. It is also sometimes a good idea to leave and look for opportunities elsewhere where you can build on your knowledge and apply some of the lessons you have learnt previously in a new environment.
Within the IET, I have mentored students going through the Present Around The World competition, I was also active with our local on-campus groups giving advice to students there.
And of course, get involved with your Local IET Network. The more you put in, the more you get out.
Final thoughts
Honestly, AI worries me. I am not worried that AI will kill the engineering profession so much as make it that you only need one or two engineers where before you would have needed a dozen and having a team with people of different engineering backgrounds and experience levels is great for generating ideas, learning from each other, getting different views on things and indeed, to play silly pranks on each other.
Would I do it all again
I am a product of my successes and of my failures, my good, bad and at times downright stupid decisions. Going back and telling myself to buy bitcoin might have set me on a path to be a crypto-bro rather than an engineer or project manager but that wouldn’t necessarily improve me as a person.
I daresay I would probably give myself a pat on the back and tell myself that I’m ok, that I’m doing alright.
People, eh!
Workplaces, and indeed Engineering Institutes, are made of people and processes and these can at times make the well-meaning engineer curse the heavens in frustration. If you are an afficionado of the stoic school of philosophy, you will know that sometimes, wisdom is knowing that there are things you can affect, and things that you cannot and that you should thus focus your efforts on the things you can change and often, that can mean changing yourself… but sometimes, it means fighting a carefully picked battle to change things.
Want to share your own Career journey with the EngX Community? Let us know at community-online@ietengx.org
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