How do you measure your success as a manufacturing engineer?

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It is very important that manufacturing engineers are analytical and data-driven, thus it is important that they use their KPIs and business impact to define their level of success. It is ok if an engineer values soft metrics, but their performance should mainly be measured by hard data. Your answer to this question should show that you are driven by business performance and that you constantly remain cognizant of your performance relative to KPI targets.

"While I pride myself in delivering excellent customer satisfaction and helping make peoples' jobs easier, I understand that my performance is ultimately defined by my execution of my goals and performance relative to my individual KPIs. I measure my success not only by the KPIs I am measured against in my evaluation, but also by my ability to drive positive change in business metrics for the company I work for."

"A couple of methods. One: set daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for myself and measure the difference between my output and that intended. Also, I would find some sort of global data source of competitor output and set my goal to at least twice theirs whether it be production output or quality, for example, and measure the difference each month. Additionally, I would seek regular feedback from my higher-ups, "

Anonymous Answer

"Success as an engineer is easy to define in terms of performance metrics. Various departments relying on engineering support will know that success is hitting those KPIs. For example, lowered downtime, reduced changeover time or setup time, or perhaps even increased throughput for the ones who've figured everything else out. For me, it is also equally things like employee retention, maximum participation in training programs, and lowering safety risks for the production members by new initiatives. All of that may not directly produce more in terms of output but eventually adds great value to the organization and helps them build a better culture."

Marcie's Feedback

Great! You have provided an excellent definition of success. Do you personally use lowered downtime, reduced changeover/setup time, and increased throughput to measure your success? Can you provide an example of a time when you hit certain KPIs and felt successful? When you mention employee retention, do you mean your ability to keep employees on your team happy? Can you cite an example of when you improved team morale, encouraged your team to participate in training, or established an initiative that lowered safety risks? Adding further clarification and some examples will strengthen your response. Nice job!