What I do for work

10/11/2024

I work at a vegetable oil refinery located just outside Barcelona.

Unsure if what I do can be encompassed by one generic job title. Here are a couple terms that more or less apply to what I focus on:

• Manufacturing Engineer
  • Manufacturing Software Engineer
• Data Engineer
• Industrial DataOps Engineer
• System Architect
• Cheesy and buzzwordy title: Industry 4.0 Engineer

What does a vegetable oil refinery do?

Input: crude vegetable oil

Output: refined vegetable oil

Let's draw an analogy to a Smart restaurant

We're going to imagine a burger restaurant

Input: buns, patties, veggies, cheeses, sauces

Output: burger

The burger restaurant has:

• a point of sale system (the counter/cash register/McDonalds type touchscreens)
• kitchen equipment
  • grills
  • fryers
  • fridges/freezers
• ingredient stock/inventory
  • and some system to manage this inventory
    • and some wholesale procurement system

The burger restaurant needs to:

• take orders from customers
• decompose those orders into an ingredient list
• retrieve the ingredients from stock
• prepare the ingredients
  • grill/fry/slice/dice
• assemble the ingredients
• deliver burger to customer
• manage a whole bunch of other things that I won't enumerate like: finances/accounting/marketing

Some questions the manager of the burger restaurant might like the answer to:

• how many orders have we had this month/week/day
  • how does that compare to last month/week/day
• what are our
  • most popular orders
  • most profitable orders
  • slowest/fastest orders
    • what makes them slow/fast
      • one grill keeps burning patties so orders need to be remade
      • one order requires an ingredient that has a 15 minute prep time
• how much extra inventory are we keeping
• how close are we to JIT (just in time) delivery of our inventory
• how is our kitchen equipment doing
  • do all grills perform equally
    • why is one grill suddenly using a lot more gas?
  • do any appliances need maintenance
• are we preparing orders in the most optimal sequence
• someone just ate a burger and claims part of it was undercooked
  • can we look through our burger logs and verify this claim or see what's up

A customer walks up to the touchscreen of the burger restaurant

They select a variety of different burger combinations for their group of friends. They press proceed to checkout and tap to pay.

A series of automated processes begin in the back of the burger restaurant

The exact ingredients and quantities needed are retrieved from stock

The inventory system takes note of this reduction in stock

More stock is ordered from suppliers if conditions fall below a certain threshold

The patties are placed on the grill as spaces become available - its a busy restaurant and the grills are usually operating at maximum capacity so equipment usage needs to be scheduled efficiently

Different orders require different sequences of steps to be completed - some of these steps can be completed in parallel - some are strictly in series

The burger restaurant's management system takes care of optimizing the order these steps get executed

The grill follows an optimized temperature curve that has empirically been developed to cook each patty to their specification given by the customer order

Temperature and gas sensors on the grill monitor how aligned the real temperature and gas consumption curves follow the theoretical curves

The rest of the ingredients are prepped and assembled with the finished patties

The order is packaged and delivered to the hungry customers

The burger restaurant's management system takes note of:

• the exact time it took to produce each meal
• the exact cost of each meal
  • how much that specific patty cost from a particular supplier that particular week
  • how much electricity or gas was consumed in preparing the meal
    • x the cost of electricity and gas in the moment the burger was made
• how much each meal was sold for
• ...

In order to have automatic answers to the manager's questions above and for the above automation to be possible, the burger restaurant needs a lot of non-trivial software, but the manager is no software engineer, they just know a lot about burgers

Enter: me