Hello again 👋.

In my last series of posts, I introduced you to the job roles that you may encounter when working in manufacturing. This series of posts explained what job roles exist in a typical factory and what responsibilities a person working in those job roles has.

The people who work in factories are called end users. End users use equipment designed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to manufacture their products. Typically, a factory will buy machines from different OEMs and hire a System Integrator (SI) to integrate all of the machines into one cohesive system.

An OEM or SI has a completely different set of job roles than an end user.

In this series, I’ll introduce you to the roles that you may encounter at an OEM or SI. By the end of the series, you will be able to list the most common OEM and SI job roles and explain the typical responsibilities of the people occupying those roles.

Before we move on, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself to anyone who might be new to the blog.

My name is Ken Bourke and I have worked as an automation professional for almost a decade. During this time, I have worked on large global projects in different industries around the world.

In the last year, I have started producing content online to share my knowledge through free blog posts and free or very reasonably priced courses.

If you get some value out of this post then consider checking out my courses, joining the mailing list using the form at the bottom of this page, or, if you’re feeling very generous, buying me a coffee using the Buy Me a Coffee widget on this page.

With that bit of shameless self-promotion out of the way, let’s get back to learning about job roles in industrial automation.

OEM and SI Job Roles

There are many career paths available for people who want to work in the manufacturing industry. In an OEM that is designing and building machinery or an SI that is integrating OEM equipment in a factory, some common job roles include;

• Owner or Executive,
• Engineering Manager,
• Controls Engineer,
• Electrical Engineer,
• Mechanical Engineer,
• Process Engineer,
• Field Service Engineer and Technician,
• Buyer or Purchaser
• Sales Engineer

In this series, I will explain what responsibilities people working in these roles have and what metrics their performance is judged on. Many OEM and SI companies are small businesses where one person may perform more than one role.

In some companies that I have worked with, one person filled all of the roles!

Wrap Up

In this post, I introduced you to my Roles in OEMs and SIs series.

In it, I explained what an Original Equipment Manufacturer and System Integrator do and listed the job roles that you may encounter at OEM and SI companies.

In the following parts, I will explain what people working in these job roles do on a daily basis.

In the next part of the series, I’ll introduce you to owners and executives. These are the senior people who own or run OEM and SI businesses.

If you haven't already, sign up to the mailing list below to be notified when that part of the serieis is published.