After your apprenticeship, how did you arrive at where you are today?
My next career move was to take on a process engineer position, working on the shop floor to develop and write the manufacturing processes for our products. That then led to a role in materials engineering before switching my focus away from engineering and towards business. I studied a business degree and worked with the business support team for a short time. This helped me become a project manager for a further two years.
By that point, I had identified a need for the business to have someone in a dedicated continuous improvement and operational excellence role. So, I wrote a job description and pitched it to the Senior Leadership Team. They agreed with me that the business really needed someone to oversee this part of the operation and offered me a position as Operational Excellence Manager. Finally, last year, I picked up the additional responsibilities of quality management as well.
What is involved in your current role? What do you do on a day-to-day basis?
There are two main elements to the role. On the one side, I am responsible for all of Teledyne Space Imaging’s continuous improvement programmes. The other part of it is to oversee all quality assurance work. Continuous improvement ensures that we can keep up with industry trends and requirements in order to remain competitive. It is about trying to maximise our efficiencies.
There are so many new technologies out there than can help us improve our efficiencies and effectiveness and I am involved in working out how best to incorporate them into our plans. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a big part of this recently. I have spent quite some time working out how AI can help us streamline our processes and alleviate some of the more repetitive activity that takes up so much time and resource.
Moving on to the quality part of my role, this is highly important. In the space industry, we must adhere to very high, exacting levels of quality in order to deliver what our customers need. One of our main quality requirements is ISO 9001. I am responsible for all internal and external audits for ISO 9001. We have a number of very large, international customers, who rely on us providing information at the right time and in the right format for their own quality auditing purposes.
I am also responsible for the business quality management system. This defines all of our process that we follow as a business, from project management to cleanroom controls. It’s centrally managed and available and applicable to all teams and departments in the company. We define the processes by which people must work to ensure that the quality of our products is of the highest standard consistently.
What changes are you seeing in your customer base in terms of quality management requirements and the products and services you are providing in this field?
One thing that we have seen is a change in standpoints as companies such as SpaceX start to bring down the barriers of entry to working in space for other organisations and therefore a change to how we support customers around quality. We’re now seeing more commercial parties entering the space market, which has changed the type of products we are being asked to supply.
Previously, space agencies like ESA or NASA would launch a single satellite, which had to work flawlessly first time and not need any maintenance once up in space. Now, commercial companies are sending constellations of 15 or 20 satellites up into space at any one time. So, if one or two don’t operate exactly as planned, it is less of a disaster as there are several more up there that are working correctly.
The quality parameters are therefore different and we need to be versatile enough to adjust accordingly. I have been integral in defining the process to create more standard space products for commercial missions, expanding on our catalogue of products that customers can buy ‘off the shelf’ to service this growing market.
What do you enjoy most about your work and building a career in the space sector?
I love all the different parts of my job, but especially the continuous improvement and operational excellence side of things. I have always said that I don’t just come to work to do a job; I come to make a difference. Seeing how the things that I enable through developing processes or making improvements positively affects our output is hugely rewarding.
Watching the tools that I develop get rolled out across other parts of the business is also very pleasing. I really enjoy seeing how something that I worked on for one part of the business can be scaled up to help other areas too. It gives me huge job satisfaction.
In terms of working in the wider space sector, I really like working right at the sharp end of technology. The news stories that are coming out in the media now are about space science projects, or Earth observation missions that we started working on years ago in some cases. Meanwhile, we have moved on to developing even more innovative technology that will be instrumental in developing how we work in space and come to learn more of its secrets in the future. That is pretty exciting.
