Research and Development Institute of Mechanical Engineering

Transcription

I'm Simon Taylor, I'm the Chief Engineer at the chocolate production facility here in Slough. I'm responsible for the Engineering team here who deliver significant change projects within our factory. Mars has been here since 1932 when Forrest Mars came to start the business we now know as the global Mars Incorporated business. We have reach across 71 countries, across pet food, chocolate, Wrigley's Gum, food and drinks. Here in the UK, we're the only Mars Chocolate factory. We produce iconic brands such as Mars, Snickers®, Maltesers®, Galaxy® Chocolates, and just to give you the scale of the production, we can make in excess of 2.5 million Mars Bars a day. My name's Ed Godsell and I'm a Project Engineer with Mars Chocolate. I've been with the company for about two and a half years now and two of those years were spent on the Mars Graduate scheme. When people think of the fast-moving consumer goods industry, they don't generally think of engineering. But actually the role that engineering plays is critical in getting those products on the market. We take the products all the way from conception through to actually implementing and making these products a reality. Our factories are designed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and nearly all year. Therefore, it's critical for us as engineers that we designed our production facilities to avoid down time. A loss of twenty minutes can be significant in terms of the impact for us, both in efficiency and cost. It's therefore imperative that our engineers focus to that level of detail to provide optimum control at all stages of the process. Mars is proud to be a values-driven business, and through our principles in action, we've made significant commitments about our sustainability in a generation. This means zero fossil fuel energy use and zero greenhouse gas emissions. Through looking at how our process operates, finding where the waste is, minimizing it, or converting it into usable energy. Examples would be looking at exhaust gasses, high temperature outlets into the atmosphere. By simple engineering steps of installing a heat exchanger, we can recover that energy and use it in another process, such as heating up water. In this factory alone, we've made significant steps forwards in reducing our energy footprint. From this site, we're already zero impact on landfills, but we don't want to stop there. In all our designs, we look at how we minimize our waste streams. So as engineers, we design our processes to have full recycle capabilities so wasted chocolate is melted down and fed back into the process. When we look at our packaging machines, we need to make sure that they are optimum for their use of packaging materials, so we minimize wastage and damaged materials, again reducing our impact on waste from this factory. Engineering is not a static process for us here at Mars, so innovation plays a critical role in what we do every day. For us, innovation can be about improving processes that we already have to make them more efficient, faster, to reduce downside. But innovation is also in terms of products. So think of the products you've seen in the last 36 months on your supermarket shelves, specifically think of the chocolate products you may have seen. Those products have come to you through innovation. Here at Mars, we're committed to developing engineering talent to continue to drive our business forwards. So recruiting the right associates to work within our teams is critical for our success. We work very closely with universities across the country to identify and recruit the right talent. So when I was looking for a company to work for out of university I looked at Mars and heard good things about their graduate scheme. And after I looked into it I realized how great and how well suited it would be to me. The diversity within the scheme, the structure that it has, and actually, the project management we were able to do as engineers really appealed to me. And that is why I took the job at Mars. As a Project Engineer at Mars, I work as part of a project team, and my specific role at the moment is as the Process Engineer on that team. Which means that I'm involved in managing a budget of more than 2 million pounds. And to think that I've only been here for two years, I'm quite proud of. Being charted with the I. Mech. E. is really important to me. The tools and the information that the I. Mech. E. provide are really beneficial in my day-to-day life. If I think back to two years ago when I joined the company, I was really struggling to get to grips with the project management, but actually, some of the tools and the competency framework the I. Mech. E. offer were really beneficial and helped me get to grips with project engineering. The thing that I love about being an engineer is taking the theory and then making it a reality, and Mars is great for that. We take a project all the way from scoping it, through designing it, implementing it, and then commissioning it and getting it up and running. It's really seeing that tangible benefit that I love about Mars. And the other great thing is that you get that broad experience. So many other mechanical industries are specifically focused on design or on commissioning, and actually at Mars you get to see the whole breadth of that engineering lifecycle. I'm proud to be an engineer working at Mars. We have a very competitive market set and engineering plays a critical role in driving our business forward. The things I love is the breadth I have to get involved with, the level of detail I need to go down to, and the people I need to interact with across the business here in the UK, but also across the globe. This is a really exciting time to be part of engineering. Things are moving so fast in the industry, and being in a company like Mars that's at the forefront of this makes it even more exciting to be involved in.