Designtek

Mechanical design for hire

Imagine coming to work at your office one day and finding a For Sale sign in front of the business. This happened eight years ago to Lew Baum, president of Designtek, an engineering job shop and mechanical design firm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Naturally feeling alarmed about the possibility of his livelihood vanishing, Baum eventually gathered his wits, investigated the situation, and bought the firm from its owner. Today, Designtek finds itself prospering in the sometimes topsy-turvy world that firms like this operate in. Call it stability in a storm.

Mechanical design firms essentially serve as an extension of their client company’s engineering department. Designtek has 10 people on staff, six working in-house and the others at outside companies. Clients consist mostly of manufacturing companies and range from North Carolina to Connecticut.

According to Baum, “Everything that comes to us has to be done right away and has probably been let go or has become a hot project.” If companies have time on a project, they often send design work overseas. “But we get it if it has to be done quickly, if it has to have expertise they can’t find elsewhere, or if it needs face-to-face interaction to make the job go smoothly.” He adds, “In today’s world, companies staff for their low to medium cycles, and where they’re busy, they outsource. That’s where we fit in, where a company is overloaded with projects, and they want to take a couple off their engineering department’s plate and outsource them. We try to do it so that in a lot of ways, people don’t realize it’s being done outside.”

In this age of computers, much of Designtek’s mechanical design work involves modeling designs in 3-dimensional software. They often reverse engineer prototypes or drawings to develop a 3D CAD model and drawing set for use in fabrication and documentation, using programs such as Pro/Engineer, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks.

A Bold Move
For seven years starting in 1989, what is now Designtek was part of United Technical Associates as one of their in-house design services groups. Then the president of the company sold it to H.L. Yoh Company, a major engineering jobshopping company, and it existed for three years under that arrangement. Then, as Baum recalls, “I came to work one day, and there was a sign outside our building that said ‘1500 square feet of office space available immediately,’ so we checked around and found out that unfortunately it was us, and H.L. Yoh actually had closed all the other groups like ours within the company and never offered to sell the department or anything. I guess because we had been around for three years and they got to know me, their first choice was for me to buy the group, and that’s what I did. So as of January 1, 2000, we became Designtek and kept all the clients we were working with and boldly went out on our own.”

Besides a design firm, United Technical Associates was also a job shop, and Baum reports, “We have so many clients that would come to us for temp staffing requirements that we still do it for some of our clients.” Jobshopping involves placing an engineer in a company as a temporary contractor to work fulltime for them, often on a specific project. Jobs usually last a matter of months but sometimes extend for years. Occasionally, temp engineers will go permanent with a company after working there six months or so. Designtek handles temp-to-permanent placement.

In helping companies with their engineering efforts, Baum says, “One of the greatest things we bring to the table is cross pollination.” In typical jobs they encounter, someone on staff has dealt with a similar situation previously. Designtek employees have diverse backgrounds in tooling and product development as well as many of the popular CADD systems used today.

For example, Hans Backermans has an engineering degree from the University of Pittsburgh and has been with Designtek since he got out of school in 1992. Bill Rudy used to work at Amp in Harrisburg (now Tyco Electronics) and has 38 patents to his credit and a reputation among local industry as a talented designer. Dave Finch is between his B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering. “We usually have a couple of degreed engineers on the crew here,” states Baum, himself a certified manufacturing engineer.

Passion for Their Work
Sitting in a conference room at his office one day, Baum blurts out, “I’ve got the best job in the world.” He went on to describe how he visited Steinway piano company in New York City on a job. They were looking at changing over manufacturing operations done by craftsmen for over a century to being done by machine, all while holding the same quality and craftsmanship they’re known for.

“The stuff that keeps our people here and makes us happy is we get to see what all these companies do for a living. They’re all ingenious in one way or another,” Baum explains. He cites the variety of the work you don’t get from working direct for a company. “We can be working on medical devices, aeseptic filling machines for a pharmaceutical industry, electronic connectors, or a composter for a cattle or milk farm that composts tons of waste. All companies have different problems they run into.” They deal with customers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to individual entrepreneurs.

In its engineering efforts, Designtek employs a full range of technologies to provide prototypes of designs. For larger companies, they often work with their in-house machine shop. In addition, Baum says, “We partner with many fabrication shops, and they come to us for the design work. We’re acting as their engineering department. So it goes both ways. They don’t have to keep a full engineering staff on, and we don’t have to go out and buy all the shop equipment to do turnkey projects.”

Baum describes Designtek’s business as cyclical, one that fluctuates with the manufacturing companies they serve. “We go from crazy busy years to slow to back to being really busy. We try to diversify enough that we’re not servicing all the same industry. We have 50 or 70 different clients we’ve worked with over the past seven years, so that when one’s up, the other one’s down. We’re always looking.” With that approach, and with the entrepreneurial Baum steering the ship, Designtek employees shouldn’t have to worry about finding a For Sale sign in front of their office anytime soon.

Snapshot

Company:
Designtek

Type:
Mechanical design firm and job shop

Location:
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Website:
www.designtekinc.com

Types of engineers they use: Mechanical

Outlook for hiring engineers: “We are always looking,” says President Lew Baum. They seek engineers both for jobshopping and in-house designing.

What they look for in engineers: For the in-house work, Baum says, “I don’t look at degrees as much as the person’s overall engineering ability and the ability to get the job done and done well. I don’t discriminate either. If the right person comes in and has all kinds of education, I love that too.” Time is always a crunch, so the ability to work fast and under pressure comes in handy. They have used entry-level engineers on occasion, but having a wide variety of experience is preferred. “Having computer modeling skills always helps.” They try to model projects in the software the customer is running, so it’s best to know three or four systems to cover ones they might need.

Contact for submitting resumes:
Lew Baum, president 717-939-7730, lbaum@designtekinc.com

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2006 Progressive Engineer