ASME, Siemens Gas and Power Collaboration Provides Additive Manufacturing Training in Engineering Fields
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iemens Gas and Power and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), in November 2019, announced their collaboration on the development of additive manufacturing (AM) training services offered through Material Solutions, a Siemens Business, as an extension of its additive services portfolio. The agreement laid the groundwork for the creation of AM training solutions to better support Siemens’ customers on their AM efforts. Siemens Gas and Power, based in Houston, brings its technical application content as a leading industry user of AM to the partnership, combining it with ASME’s competency model framework and learning and development platform. The International Titanium Association made arrangements to learn more about this collaboration effort, in order to provide insights into the state of the art for AM. The following is a question-andanswer interview, facilitated by Monica Shovlin of MCShovlin Communications LLC, Eugene, OR, who does marketing and communications work for ASME. How did this partnership come about? What’s the mission of this effort? Arin Ceglia, ASME director of learning and development, said that “Siemens Energy and ASME are partnering to work towards scaling workforce development 16
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across the field of engineering. ASME’s agile course development, educational technology and learning science expertise—combined with Siemens broad AM know-how and experience—will enhance ASME’s Learning and Development course offerings.” Marcus Siebold, vice president of AM at Siemens Power and Gas, said he sees a trend in which design engineers need to get additively manufactured parts designed, manufactured, validated, and developed quicker than in the past. He believes this is primarily because “we are moving from prototyping to serial production. And serial production is all about speed efficiency and effectiveness of implementation. Today, we need to think a lot about how we can upskill and train our workforce given that increased requirement for speed.” Siebold sees “the need for a holistic company-wide training and education concept that includes everyone from the design engineer at the part identification phase on how to combine different parts into one, how to see the benefits of the technology, the operator who needs to learn how to operate the tools, quality engineers inspecting the parts... all the way to the logistic and procurement people who do things like secure powder.” ASME courses are built as part of a competency framework, or a learning architecture, which is carefully constructed to roll up to
the big picture from every course. Because of this, courses also contribute to completing a stronger picture of a learner’s knowledge capabilities, indicating levels achieved in a set of core competencies, with skills sitting underneath. These competencies are about much more than just a pass or fail. Strengths and weaknesses in one competency or skill can be made visible not just to students and instructors, but also to company management. Employers can track their employees’ progress in these competencies or skills, identifying areas of progress as well as where improvement (and targeted investment) is needed. Besides the format of delivery, having high-quality industry experts teach the courses gives learners a focus on practicality and application. ASME courses are not static; they deliver takeaways or job aids engineers can implement in their own workflows. The course on design for additive manufacturing, for example, includes an Advanced Manufacturing Flight Check ™, a tangible checklist and on-the-job aid that helps design engineers validate a design before the final build. Engineers can rely on tools like this long after the class has ended. As a result of this partnership, the engineering community will benefit from an expansive body of subjectmatter expertise, rooted in more than 10 years of scalable serial production experience in AM. All aspects of AM design, materials, and processes will be covered while connecting the
