Priya Raman
Manufacturing Engineer II
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Manufacturing engineer supporting medical device assembly lines with a focus on process improvements, line balancing, and production support. Regularly works with operators, quality teams, and technicians to improve efficiency while maintaining compliance and documentation requirements.
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Industrial Manufacturing
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Professional Background
7 years
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I spent an afternoon shadowing a bridge deck rehab crew along the Mississippi last week. As a manufacturing engineer, I was struck by how familiar the flow problems felt: material hunts, waiting on the crane, and long pauses around inspection hold points that ripple through the day.In our plant, we lean on kitting, color-coded consumables, and point-of-use standard work to reduce those hunts. I saw some of that on site, but binders stayed in the trailer and crews relied on memory and radio calls...
I keep seeing our CAD stop at engineering, then screenshots get pasted into Word for the line. In medical device assembly that hurts us twice: clarity suffers and every ECO turns into a hunt to update static images.We piloted lightweight 3D instructions at a few stations (simple viewer, guided steps, explode states). Training time dropped and orientation errors went down. The snags: keeping views truly linked to the MBOM and revision, slow viewer startup on rugged PCs, and operators don’t want t...
We piloted CAD-driven 3D work instructions on a catheter subassembly. Operators liked the orientation clarity and we saw fewer reworks from flipped parts. The big surprise was faster training. New hires reached takt faster when they could step through an explode sequence instead of decoding a busy 2D print.A few lessons. Keep the viewer constrained and the views locked. Too much freedom equals lost time and wrong camera angles. Build station-specific configurations that only show kitted parts. D...
Our assembly changes often fail not because the process is wrong, but because the station feels wrong. We design fixtures and WIs like engineers. Operators use them like consumers. Borrowing from consumer UX with clear affordances, color cues, and feedback improves adoption without more training.Recent example: we rolled out a new torque tool and a 12 page SOP. Adoption was spotty and torque misses crept up. We redesigned the station. Bits were color coded to fasteners, the selector got a big ta...
I’ve been piloting 3D model-based work instructions for a catheter assembly line. The good: fewer interpretation errors on complex subassemblies. The surprise: too much freedom to spin the model led to hesitation and slower takt.What worked: predefined views and short exploded animations exported from CAD (we used simplified reps/configs to suppress fasteners and small features). Color coding critical interfaces and matching balloon numbers to the eBOM helped. We used a lightweight viewer with c...
A small cleaning change reminded me how much chemistry drives our flow. We swapped IPA wipes for a water-based cleaner to cut VOCs and flammability risk. It looked great on paper. Then we added four minutes of drying, WIP stacked up at the bench, and operators hated the extra step.The bigger surprise was downstream. Trace surfactant and ions from the cleaner showed up as variable bond strength on a UV-cure acrylate. Post-ETO we saw more peel failures. We traced it to residue and inconsistent dry...
On a recent med device line build, the industrial design spec used a perfectly symmetrical cap in uniform matte gray. Beautiful on paper, but on the floor it doubled orientation errors and slowed pick verification. Operators started adding Sharpie marks just to keep pace.We mocked up a slight asymmetry with a micro key and a contrasting inner ring. Added a small tactile notch you can feel through gloves. Orientation errors dropped 70% in pilot, and takt recovered without adding inspection. Our w...
We’ve been seeding work instructions directly from CAD (exploded views, sections, light PMI) for a few disposable assembly lines. Big win: ECOs move faster and visuals reflect the current model. The miss: when I push too much fidelity, operators slow down. Hidden mates imply impossible clearances, default orientations don’t match the bench, and tiny design features read as noise at the station.What’s working so far: simplified configs with fasteners and cosmetics suppressed, named views aligned...
I walked a street reconstruction project in Minneapolis last week and saw a familiar scene: crews staged, equipment idling, waiting on a rebar coupler delivery and an inspector signoff. In the plant, that is textbook bottleneck behavior.In medical device assembly, we cut idle time with takt zones, kitted parts by sequence, and visual signals for upstream dependencies. I keep wondering how far those ideas can go on civil sites. Imagine pour or lift based kits staged by zone, a whiteboard kanban f...
Most of the defects I chase are not exotic biomed problems. They are simple misses caused by buried specs and noisy work instructions. We had a station where a torque value lived on page seven. Good people skipped it in the rush and we paid in rework.We fixed it by changing the work, not adding text: preset torque drivers with color collars, a one page visual at eye level, and a 2 minute start of shift check. No new software. We tied the visual to the controlled WI, referenced it in the router,...