“I’m driven to succeed, and I want everyone around me to succeed as well,” said Tim Engel, program manager, SpeedCast.
“We all have occasional days when we don’t feel like ‘adulting,’ but most days I’m excited to be here,” Engel said. “I’m competitive. I want to have the best team and the most successful customers.”
Originally hired in 2012 as a service delivery manager in the Houston office, Engel was promoted to regional service manager in 2014.
“I support commercial maritime vessels, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and some land operations in addition to supporting customers,” Engel said. “I oversee the budgets within these customer projects and manage the field services group – a team of eight – in Houston.”
Despite an already full schedule, Engel has always looked for additio
nal opportunities for advancement. He recently channeled this motivation into action by completing the Six Sigma Green Belt training, an integrated and disciplined approach for improving business performances.
“When I was hired I knew that I wanted to be Six Sigma certified,” Engel said.
With a work history that spans everything from military service to public relations, Engel advises: “I’m process-oriented and came to the company with a foundation of process-improvement knowledge and an understanding of how to make effective changes. One key is to get those impacted involved.”
“After an initial one week training course you begin a practical project to apply what you’ve learned,” Engel said, recounting his Six Sigma certification process. “I started a project investigating field service technician utilization and time coding. It was basically a deep dive into the time charging processes. The goal was to reduce the volume of indirect labor hours and increase billable hours.”
“Part of the project involved increasing the collaboration between our techs and the customer support center (CSC),” Engel said. “Ultimately, the outcome is that tech-to-tech and tech-to-CSC training and support has greatly improved and the indirect labor hours being billed were decreased.”
After concluding his first project, Engel attended another weeklong training before beginning a second project. Green Belt certification requires that participants complete 50 hours of in-class training, as well as two projects, within 12 months.
Having completed his first Six Sigma certification, Engel is already looking to the future.
“Moving forward, I think I’ll continue to implement Green Belt projects as I see the need arise. There’s frequent change here, but I like change,” Engel said. “I love new experiences and I get antsy for something different if I’m doing the same thing for too long. It actually works to my advantage to have a new title or new responsibilities and projects every so often. It’s the way I’m wired—it sparks something new in me. If I get a new role or new customers, this training has equipped me with the skills to identify situations where it would be useful to implement a Six Sigma project and the knowhow to undertake that analysis.”
