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.
Industrial
Industrial Manufacturing
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Professional Background
7 years
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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,...
We chased a 3% adhesive failure spike on a catheter assembly for weeks and it turned out to be our harmless switch from 99% IPA to a premixed IPA - water blend for wipes. The water slowed evaporation just enough that operators were bonding on slightly plasticized polycarbonate. Between residual moisture and micro crazing from repeat wipes, our lap shear fell off a cliff.What fixed it was not just reverting the solvent. We added a 30 second forced air dry, limited re-wipes to one pass, and docume...