Kick-starting new engineers at EDS Casting & Forging B.V.

Master thesis (2018)

Authors

M.R. ter Kuile Industrial Design Engineering

Contributors

E. Tempelman (supervisor 1)
H. Kuipers (supervisor 1)
Enzio Lette (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Industrial Design Engineering
Copyright: © 2018 Mathijs ter Kuile
Casting Designing Engineers Forging EDS Casting and Forging Kickstarting
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Published Date

15-11-2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Abstract

EDS Casting and Forging B.V. (EDS) is an Amsterdam-based design agency, specialised in redesigning welded assemblies into castings. As EDS is growing rapidly, and plan to keep on growing, they expressed a need of centralising their in-house design knowledge. From this need, the following problem statement was formulated:

“New engineers at EDS have a lack of easily accessible sources, to learn how to design an economical casting or forging”

To approach this problem, the following research questions were formulated:

What does a new engineer need to learn in order to design an economical casting or forging at EDS?
What kind of learning source could fit within EDS?

To find answers to those research questions an analysis phase was executed considering the following topics:
EDS Casting and Forging
Designing at EDS
An economical casting or forging
New engineers at EDS
Learning sources
Estimating cost

As can be observed, these topics cover all crucial elements of the research questions, enabling the analysis phase to answers them. The insights from this analysis were used to create concepts, and define design criteria to evaluate those concepts.

The concept that was chosen to develop further was the EDS kick-start, a program specially designed to optimise the learning curve for new engineers at EDS.
The EDS kick-start is divided in 3 phases:
The 1st phase takes 1 week. In this week, the new engineer should obtain as much knowledge about casting and forging as possible. For this phase the EDS traineeship was developed.
The 2nd phase takes 3 months. During this period the new engineer needs to be productive for EDS, while still learning new skills and knowledge. For this phase a recommendation was made for an EDS learning sources overview.
The 3rd phase takes as long as the engineer is working for EDS. During this phase the engineer should be fully enabled to learn from the projects he is doing. For this phase a recommendation was made for an EDS quotation book.

The product of phase 1, the EDS traineeship is the main focus of this project. This traineeship was developed using the principle of constructive alignment (Biggs, 2011). The assignments of the traineeship were inspired by the ‘7 principles of good teaching’ (Chickering, 1987) and build upon learning goals that were shaped, making use of Blooms taxonomy (Bloom, 1956).

An early version of the traineeship was tested with a new engineer and found to be very valuable for both the trainee, the mentor, and therefore, also for EDS. With the testing insights the traineeship was developed further to an final version, and presented to EDS, ready to be used for the foreseeable future.