Congratulations.  If you are employed in manufacturing today, it’s probably because you are doing the work that was once done by four people.  Outsourcing is the buzz word (and the employment buzz saw) that has changed the relationship between the technical representative and the plant engineer or maintenance technician. 

Thirty five years ago, the manufacturing engineer would have his staff design a project and invite the manufacturer’s representative in to prepare a proposal for preselected equipment.  Today, there is no staff.  The over scheduled engineer barely has time to describe the problem to the representative and expects in return a packaged solution including engineering design, equipment selection, and often project management. 

The manufacturing engineer often finds a representative he can trust and that representative becomes the engineer’s staff.  The representative understands the competition is not another representative, but the threat of the customer’s home office moving the local plant to China, Mexico or India.  Both the engineer and the representative have a stake in making the plant as efficient as possible.  The representative today is as concerned about the return on investment of purchased capitol equipment as the plant engineer.  Both the engineer’s job and the representative’s job depend on the plant’s ability to compete globally.

In order to meet the challenges of the current role, the manufacturer’s representative is forced to add resources including his own engineering staff, computer aided design stations, technical seminars, test equipment, and, of course, technical sales people.  A phone call from the plant engineer for an appointment with the representative may result in a proposal for a plant audit, a system engineering package, equipment design and pricing, or a free “lunch and learn” seminar. 

A plant engineer who finds a manufacturer’s representative with the experience and support staff worthy of his time and trust creates a resource often developing into a partnership to meet legislative hurdles and global challenges yet to come.