2021 Women in Engineering
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Toha Poveda Application Engineering Manager Sensor Products
Dodge Mechanical Power Transmission Company, Inc. B.S. Mechanical Engineering and M.S. Engineering Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Toha Poveda is currently the Application Engineering Manager for Sensor Products at Dodge Mechanical Power Transmission Company, Inc. She specializes in smart sensors for mounted bearings, enclosed gearing, and other power transmission products. She is a native of Ecuador and is fluent in Spanish and English. She started her career with Dodge as a Mechanical Designer and quickly moved into an Application Engineering role on the Bearing and PT Components teams. She took on the responsibility of supporting the new Dodge Smart Sensor for Mounted Bearings product line. She has received an ABB Above and Beyond Award for her outstanding customer service, and her peers also awarded her with the 2019 Application Engineering Excellence Award.
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Talk about the culture at your company. What makes it inclusive or supportive of women in engineering and automation? Managers of women engineers play an important role in supporting women professionally and personally. It is important for them to understand that we may have personal responsibilities, such as the great joy of being a mother, which are essential aspects of our lives. I can proudly say that I am the mother of three beautiful children and my professional career has not stopped me from being there for them. I have been blessed with managers and a company culture that understand my career and family are important to me. My managers have always been flexible in their approach and supported me when needed. A company that supports a work-life balance is the key to attract more women engineers in the workplace. It is also important to note that it is not only a company’s responsibility to create a supportive environment for women in engineering, it is also our responsibility to push harder to make our opinions heard. Describe a recent company project (in which you were involved) that went particularly well. How did you and your team go about ensuring success? I recently implemented a new tool that provides us with the ability to support our customers virtually. Its embedded guiding tools are great for quick resolution to customer requests. I learned about this new tool from a webinar that another internal business unit presented. They had been using it successfully with their customers for some time. I studied and tested the tool myself and immediately identified other departments in my company that could benefit from it. I started the project by building a diverse, cross-functional team. I engaged the engineer that presented the internal webinar, as I needed her support to allow us to borrow some licenses to test. The team includes application engineers, sales engineers, and solutions architects. During the testing period, we ran into a few issues with the firewall and getting the link set up between our engineers and our customers. I was in constant communication with the team, the appropriate managers, and our network team to ensure we could remove the barriers and test this tool appropriately. It was a successful test and we have decided to move forward and purchase our own licenses. We are deep into the quoting and implementation phase and expect to launch the technology soon. The key to this project was ensuring that we had the right people on the team who bought into the technology and that there were open and frequent lines of communication between all parties. For the rest of Toha Poveda’s insights, visit www.designworldonline.com/WiE.
www.designworldonline.com
DESIGN WORLD
10/14/21 2:16 PM
