FedEx Day

iRobot

In his book "Drive", Daniel Pink maintains there are three elements of true intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He describes FedEx Day as an example of an activity that helps boost morale, creativity and productivity.

Patti Engineering's first FedEx Day kicked off Thursday Feb 2nd at 4pm and came to a close 24 hours later, Feb 3rd at 4pm. The results are in and our FedEx day proved to be successful and enjoyable.

According to Sam Hoff, president of Patti Engineering, "The experience further proved to me what a great and talented team of engineers I have the pleasure on working with on a daily basis. The ideas the teams came up with were amazing. The only change we will make to our next FedEx day will be to extend the time by moving the start time to noon. We were all running short on time in the end!"

Listed below are short summaries for some of our projects. Many have already been implemented:

Team: iRobot

Project Title: iRobot Game

Project Description:

The team developed and finished a good portion done of programming the iRobot basketball game for the upcoming Electromatic March Madness event that Patti Engineering will be displaying at.

Team: SDI (Siemens Data Integrators)

Project Title: Siemens MSSQL Server Communications Function Block

Project Description:

The Patti Engineering Texas team set up shop at AWC's Austin office to work on a Siemens Function Block that will write data directly to a Microsoft SQL server. The initial block did not use security, but provided a quick and easy way to log data from the PLC into a database via Siemen's open TCP communications block.  

Project Title: Update Reception Area and Conference Room

Project Description:

Unused Reception Desk was disassembled and removed. Pictures were taken down in the conference room and new pictures featuring quotations from inspirational people were developed. Ryan Hibbert created a program to display real time information, the Patti Engineering photo album as well as welcome slides on a monitor to welcome office visitors.

Project Title: Siemens Frequently Used Functions Library

Project Description:

The purpose of the project was to gather function blocks in Step 7 for many of the tasks that are encountered frequently. The blocks are fully portable and standalone, meaning that they are not dependent on any global variables that may change from program to program for which the functions are to be used. The blocks were taken and modified as necessary from existing projects.

Project Title: IPC Release/Testing System

Project Description:       

Team JCI worked on developing a new system to handle needed processing in testing and releasing of IPC updates. It combined existing processes and streamline processing in order to prevent gaps and potential leak points. It will help make the release a seamless process to the end user and not affect their processing.

Project Title: Storing files in the SQL database as blobs

Project Description:

This team developed a method to store files (images, pdf, word doc) in the Pattinet database in Blob Data or in alternative data storage method for SQL server. The initial project allows employees to attached receipts to expense report entry. A future goal is to be able to store the project or sales related data and the use of a Smart Phone application. The smart phone app will ideally be able to OCR the Receipts to start the Expense reports while on the road.

Project Title: New "Engineer Chatter" Blog

Project Description:

We replaced our inactive forum on our website with our new "Engineer Chatter" blog. Our goal is to engage our community of partners, client, prospective clients and engineering team in a meaningful way. We have a highly skilled team of engineers with a wide variety of experience in many industries: powertrain manufactures, automotive parts plants, robotic paint systems in various manufacturing applications, textile mills, retail distribution centers, power plants, oil rigs on the ocean, chemical plants, and dam spillways. This is our new platform to give direct access to our engineers. Our engineering team will receive an email when a question or comment is posted to this blog. An engineer will respond to post within one business day.

Let us know if you have any feedback on our projects. We highly recommend the FedEx Day concept!