What is it like working as an automation engineer in warehousing/distribution/supply chain?
When I was in high school and trying to decide on a career, the hardest and most confusing part was understanding what it meant to work in a job in a particular type of career or industry. Sure, I could choose to become a software engineer or an urban planner, or a journalist, but I had very little context for understanding what the actual work content and day-to-day tasks would look like for me once I found a job in my chosen field. Without that information, it was difficult to make an informed decision.
I disagree with one common piece of career advice I hear frequently— that you should do what you love. I think you should do something that you enjoy or at least find interesting, and are good at, if that is possible to arrange. How can you know if you are good at something unless you understand what that something is?
As far as I know, other than internships and job shadowing, which few people have access to, there are not many resources for young people that provide them with a preview of the work they will be doing in a particular career or job function. The goal with this series of blog posts is for me to do my part to address this problem by providing the type of information I would have liked to have had access to. I would like to encourage other people to write similar posts to fill in these blanks for other types of work, career paths, and industries.
I currently work as an automation engineer for a specialty retailer. A specialty retailer is a retail businesses that focuses on specific product categories such as office supplies, men’s or women’s clothing, or electronics. Specifically, my job is concerned with automating distribution center and order fulfillment processes. Distribution centers distribute goods from suppliers to stores or other consumption channels. Order fulfillment is the process of collecting goods that were ordered and getting the goods to the person or entity that ordered them. What this means in practice is that I design, implement and support systems that automate these processes.
The equipment that does this is referred to in the industry as material handling equipment. Most people outside of the industry aren’t familiar with the term material handling. Material handling equipment is an umbrella term used by the industry to describe equipment that moves goods from place to place or processes goods. In retail distribution and order fulfillment this primarily means conveying equipment, sortation equipment, and automated storage and retrieval systems. Conveying equipment transports goods, sortation equipment intelligently directs goods to specific places, and automated storage and retrieval systems efficiently store and retrieve goods.
Goods movement and tracking is facilitated by sensors and automatic identification systems such as bar code scanners. These auxiliary components help the system track what goods are and where they are physically located. Additionally the movement is coordinated by software systems called warehouse control systems and warehouse management systems.
Before I go into more detail about the specifics of what I do, I want to talk about job titles. In my experience job titles are not very helpful in providing information about the actual work involved in performing the job. This goes double for job titles at large corporations. At large corporations job titles are managed by the HR bureaucracy which tends to force standardization.
My job title is a good example of that. Officially my title is “Facilities Project Manager”. I say I’m an automation engineer because that describes the actual work that I do, regardless of what my job title is. Project manager is an especially abused and almost meaningless job title.
Project manager typically means someone who tracks tasks, scope, schedule, and budget for project work and is not necessarily a technical or a subject matter expert in the space. They also typically don’t get “hands-on”, meaning that they aren’t responsible for doing the project work.
In my case, in addition to typical project management tasks I also am responsible for writing contracts, system design, specification development, testing strategy, test plan development, and a host of other concerns that do not typically fall within the sphere of project management.
For that reason, I don’t usually use the job title of project manager when I tell people what I do for work because project management is only a small part of what I do.
In the next post I’m going to cover how a project gets initiated and what my involvement with project initiation is. For each post I am going to try to provide an overview of the business process that I’m involved with in my job and then describe the tasks I do that support that process.
