WHAT DOES AN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER DO ?
The Application Development Engineer is responsible for software development and maintenance of manufacturing equipment, ensuring continuous improvement and user-friendly interfaces. Collaborates closely with Industrialization Engineers, providing technical expertise and support throughout the product development process. Acts as a key liaison for Momentive's Global Sales Team, delivering professional customer support and fostering relationships for innovation and excellence in product development.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Application Development Engineer
1. Application Development Engineer Duties
- Market Analysis: Understand and translate market requirements to product requirements.
- Application Development and UX Design: Define and develop application flow; consider UX requirements.
- Solution Analysis: Work with algorithms, systems, software, and other teams to analyze alternative solutions and provide data for decision-making.
- MVP Definition: Define minimum viable product working with the program/project management team.
- Tool Analysis: Tool performance and limitation analysis.
- Customer Support and Demo: Support customer demos and critical field issues.
- Feature Adoption Analysis: Analyze and drive the adoption of developed features in the field.
- Customer Application Support: Support customers in utilizing the MPM product line in Plastics and Composites applications and demonstrate clearly the value of products to the customer.
- Market Mapping Support: Support Marketing in mapping the current product offerings against local market needs.
- Material Development: Develop new silicone materials (NPI) to fulfill the changing market needs, as well as support marketing in new product launches.
- Product Benchmarking: Support Marketing through benchmark analysis of product performance in specific applications.
- Customer Inquiry and Trial Support: Follow up on key customer application inquiries and conduct the in-house trial to help with customer formulation optimization.
- Market Promotion Support: Support marketing to initiate market promotion activities including technical seminars, tradeshows, and other daily work.
2. Application Development Engineer Details
- Software Development: Responsible for the software development for manufacturing equipment and test devices.
- Continuous Improvement: Ensure continuous improvement of software (e.g., new functionalities) and design maintenance-friendly solutions by using standardized building blocks and user-friendly interfaces.
- Support Industrialization: Support Industrialization Engineers within the product development area (DFM, DFA, DFT, FMEA).
- Concept Development: Responsible for the concept development and owning the specification development process.
- Technical Documentation: Ensure proper technical documentation (user manual, troubleshooting guidelines, and MSA reports).
- Commissioning Support: Support the commissioning of manufacturing equipment and are responsible for Maintenance Engineering Training.
- Sales Liaison: Point of contact for Momentive's Global Sales Team with a focus on the automotive market.
- Customer Support: Professional customer support for current and new products, marketing, test execution, and troubleshooting, including on-site customer support (throughout the EMEAI region).
- Problem Solving: Supporting customers and global R&D teams in problem-solving with expertise in application and product know-how.
- Customer Requirements Translation: Translating customer requirements and needs for existing and new products.
- R&D Formulation: Helping design new substances with R&D formulations and defining clear technical objectives.
- Test Procedures Introduction: Introduction of application-specific test procedures and guidelines for the new materials.
- Evaluation Methods Development: Development of new evaluation and description methods for laboratory and customer-specific application support.
- Customer Relationship Establishment: Establishment of customer relationships regarding processes, production, and development.
- Product Know-How Development: Development of sound product know-how for customer applications.
3. Application Development Engineer Responsibilities
- Software Design and Development: Designs and develops simple software solutions to the level of quality defined by the requirements in adherence with I/S standards, methodology, and internal controls.
- Solution Alternatives Identification: Identifies and provides solution alternatives for the defined functional and system requirements.
- Documentation: Provides appropriate documentation for design decisions, estimating assumptions, code modules, and performance metrics by organization standards.
- Testing Participation: Conducts and/or participates in testing (i.e., unit, system integration) and reviews appropriate organization standards.
- Code Review Preparation: Prepares and conducts code and unit test walkthroughs for deliverables.
- Peer Review Participation: Participates in peer code reviews for others and provides constructive feedback.
- Collaborative Development: Collaborates with other programmers and technologists to ensure the development and maintenance of quality software solutions.
- Systems Analysis Collaboration: Collaborates with others regarding the effectiveness of systems flow, data usage, and manual or automated processes to verify requirements.
- Standard Compliance Assurance: Ensures software development meets standards for programming, design, performance, and security.
- Team Contribution: Participates in team activities and takes on additional work tasks to help the team accomplish the desired outcome or goals.
- Quality and Deadline Communication: Recognizes and communicates quality, deadline, and deliverables issues within own work environment to team leads and/or management.
- Support Provision: Provides second-level support and off-hour on-call on a rotating basis.
- Functionality Enhancement: Repairs, modifies, and develops additional functionality.
- Change Management Support: Follows and supports change management practices and internal controls standards. Communicates changes and impacts to those affected.
- Knowledge Sharing: Share knowledge and information with others to resolve problems and build team knowledge.
- Service Desk Maintenance: Creates and maintains service desk diagnostics and job aids for the area of responsibility.
- Information Update: Updates and/or reviews with those affected.
4. Application Development Engineer Job Summary
- Project Leadership and Collaboration: Technical leading and cooperation with synthetic and compounding groups to develop new applications to meet market demand.
- Market Analysis and Ideation: Analysis of market technical trends and initiation/ideation of potential applications.
- Technical Consulting: Consulting for internal and external customers.
- Technical Research and Reporting: Fulfilling technical work requests, designing experiments, performing lab bench work for analysis, and writing up reports to meet the technical targets of customer projects.
- Customer Support and On-site Service: Visiting key customers and providing on-site technical support to satisfy technical needs.
- Skill Development and Training: Developing related application processing skills and knowledge, training customer technicians in the lab, and providing technical service/troubleshooting in the field.
- Application Capability Enhancement: Enhancing application capability to continuously meet the technical/application trend.
- Product Selection and Value Delivery: Technical consulting for internal and external customers to select the suitable product and deliver the value of the product.
- Collaboration with Marketing and NBD: Working closely with marketing and NBD team and customers on new application development projects.
- Test Protocol Development and Data Creation: Developing customized test protocol/simulation test protocol and creating application data.
- Technical Presentations and Industry Engagement: Giving technical presentations to customers and commercial partners, keeping close contact with the industry, and being updated with the latest technology.
- Quality Complaint Management: Working together with sales team, QA, and production team to handle customer quality complaints.
- Regional and Local Program Implementation: Working with regional application development teams to implement global/regional application programs, as well as developing relevant local programs locally.
- Lubrizol Community Communication: Keeping communication with the Lubrizol technical community, being updated on new product development, and new processing technology development.
- Customer Needs and Market Trends: Anticipating, determining, and understanding customer needs and expectations and market trends.
5. Application Development Engineer Accountabilities
- Technical Support and Applications: Provide technical and applications-based support to the sales and marketing teams.
- Product Testing and Training: Implement product performance tests, experiments troubleshooting for customers, and hands-on training for internal sales and product teams.
- Troubleshooting and Customer Support: Troubleshoot customer issues related to diagnostic products and provide solutions where available to support business objectives.
- Feedback Analysis and Opportunity Identification: Use customer feedback to identify new opportunities and unmet needs in relation to new product proposals, product modifications, and application development.
- Custom Solutions and Technical Partnerships: Develop and support custom opportunities and be a key point of contact with the customer on technical partnership opportunities.
- Team Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: Great teammate with the ability to share knowledge and best practices, activities, and success stories across teams/regions.
- Specialty Knowledge in Coatings, Adhesives & Films: Maintain an expert level of understanding for coatings, adhesives, and films – chemistries, processing, application, and final properties.
- Film Properties Expertise: Experienced with evaluating and improving film properties through formulation and additives e.g., surface energy, mechanical properties, chemical resistance, and optics.
- Electronics Applications Expertise: Experienced with a variety of specialty uses (and challenges) in electronics, such as circuit boards, printed electronics, and other applications related to consumer devices.
- Value Chain Understanding: Understand the value chain and which parts drive decisions for a specific area of use. Connected to this, be able to speak to people at all levels in this value chain.
- Customer Requirements and Product Development: Get clear customer requirements (CTQ) and convert those, with the help of one of the Application Development Engineers, into product development material parameters that R&D can use.