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Fixing Problems One Build at a Time

Kip Hanson
By Kip Hanson Contributing Editor, SME Media
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Stacey DelVecchio has taken her push for gender equity to Washington D.C. and the halls of Congress.

Two years ago, Stacey DelVecchio woke up early to speak with a group of several hundred fellow engineers. The Women in Manufacturing Breakfast was the inaugural event at the American Gear Manufacturers Association’s biennial Motion + Power Technology Expo in Detroit, Michigan, and it was here that she ticked off some key figures from her 32 years in manufacturing.

Among them were 1,600 Mondays, 8,000 working days, 25 bosses, 56 manufacturing facilities, 25 countries, six advertising campaigns, and one husband, accomplishments that no small number of employees at Caterpillar Inc. or any other global manufacturing company can claim. It was the five lessons learned over those three decades that were perhaps most notable, however, and comprised the key points of her presentation:

  • Know Yourself
  • Find Something That Gives Your Life Meaning
  • Be Decisive
  • Speak Your Mind
  • Enjoy the Ride

Each of these is good advice, and although she claims that several remain works-in-progress, DelVecchio appears to have a good handle on all of them. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, she spent a year with Ashland Chemical before accepting a position as a development engineer at Caterpillar. That was in 1989, and she would spend the next three decades with the well-known manufacturer of earth-moving equipment, with her last 5 years building the company’s AM department.

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Stacey DelVecchio is an SME Additive Manufacturing Community Advisor as well as Principle of StaceyD Consulting.

“I was responsible for the additive manufacturing strategy that Caterpillar had and helped put it in place,” she said. “Much of that entailed building a team and developing the various tools needed to run the department, but once we got to that point, the primary thing that I personally worked on was helping the different application and product groups understand the value of additive. That meant doing business cases on why it made sense, and in many instances, why it didn’t.”

Championing the cause

There’s much more to this story than 3D printing, however. DelVecchio calls herself a “Champion for Gender Equity in STEM and Additive Manufacturing.” Her commitment to the cause shows. She was the 2013/2014 president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), an experience that “made her feel like a rock star.” She also received the SWE’s Advocating Women in Engineering Award and was once vice-chair of the Women in Engineering Committee for the World Federation of Engineering Organization (WFEO), where she represented the American Association of Engineering Societies.

Despite DelVecchio’s efforts and subsequent recognition, much work remains to be done. She explained that the percentage of women working in the engineering field remains low, this despite years of ongoing recruitment and education initiatives throughout the industry. “It’s around 15% and has stayed that way for some time now,” she said. “And unfortunately, the problem doesn’t come so much from the number of women entering the field as it does those who are leaving it.”

Inclusive environments

The reasons are many, but all appear to stem from a single source: the working environment. DelVecchio pointed to an SWE Gender Culture Study, which queried 3,200 industry professionals of both sexes and included representatives from 3M, Booz Allen Hamilton, United Technologies Corp., and Honeywell Aerospace. It stated that “Women leave the profession after working in environments that tolerate persistent obstacles to attaining their company and career goals.”

That study is backed up by one from the Harvard Business Review. It surveyed 700 engineering students from MIT, UMass, Olin College of Engineering, and the women-only Picker Engineering Program at Smith College, both during their college years and then again five years after graduation. The study also collected diary entries from 40 of those students, male and female alike. The results? “Female students do as well or better than male students in school—but often point to the hegemonic masculine culture of engineering itself as a reason for leaving.”

“The picture’s somewhat better on the manufacturing side because women have different avenues to entering the profession, and don’t necessarily need a college degree as they do with engineering,” said DelVecchio. “Even here, though, the percentage of females in the workforce is only around 25%, far less than there are men, it still isn’t great. I think the solution is to really zero in and focus on making the environment a welcoming, rewarding place to work. Doing so would not only benefit the people who want to work there, regardless of sex, but the industry overall.”

Three decades strong

DelVecchio proffered some good news: people are finally starting to talk about the problem, raising hopes that engineering departments and the manufacturing community overall will finally begin to equitably leverage what is clearly a valuable, often underestimated human resource. And despite any glass ceilings she may have struggled with over the years, DelVecchio has had a very successful and rewarding career. Over the course of her 30 years at Caterpillar, she climbed the ladder from college graduate trainee to engineering management to head of the Additive Manufacturing department.

It’s there that she took what was then a novel manufacturing process—to Caterpillar, at least—and developed a team to explore how additive manufacturing could add value for the heavy equipment producer. She engaged with other managers, educating them on 3D printing, explaining when it makes sense (and when it doesn’t), and looking for candidate applications that she would then hand off to her team to design and build on one of the company’s seven 3D printers.

Much of this work was on replacement parts for older equipment. DelVecchio quickly showed that 3D printing was both far timelier and could be more cost-effective than using traditional manufacturing processes, since it eliminates the need to re-tool for one-off maintenance and repair (MRO) components parts that are in some cases decades old. To address concerns over material integrity and qualification from the engineering department, parts were sometimes “overdesigned” using more durable metals—by substituting a cast iron component, for example, with one made from high-strength steel or a superalloy. Doing so might seem counterintuitive in terms of material cost, but it makes complete sense for these older, low-volume parts. 

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DelVecchio (front, ctr) with her AM team at Caterpillar.


“Validation is a killer in these cases, and we found in most instances that there’s neither the need nor the opportunity to redesign for additive manufacturing,” said DelVecchio. “It’s simpler just to use a stronger material with the existing design, even if that’s not an optimal solution.”

The business of additive

Shortly before her early morning breakfast speech in the Motor City mentioned earlier, DelVecchio decided to strike out on her own as a technical advisor and independent consultant. StaceyD Consulting LLC offers services such as customized workshops, keynote presentations, and 3D printing deployment assistance, and “is focused on the deployment of additive manufacturing in the industrial sector as well as advancements toward gender equity in STEM fields.”

Her typical client is similar to that of Caterpillar before its now extensive use of 3D printing—companies that want to integrate additive into their manufacturing operations but aren’t sure where to start. She said, “far too many in the industry are caught up in the ‘I want to print because I think we should be printing’ mentality, and should instead focus on ‘what problems can we fix with 3D printing?’”

“Printing just for the sake of printing is a bad idea, as it can lead to all kinds of problems down the road,” said Delvecchio. “For instance, if a 3D-printed part fails unexpectedly or turns out to be ineffective for a specific application, a company can end up losing people as well as significant revenue. It’s also important to recognize that the investment can rarely be justified with a single use case, whether it’s lightweighting, or part consolidation, or improving the cooling characteristics of certain parts.

“Time and time again, I find it’s a combination of all these and more, and that each application has its own unique value proposition. That’s why I always tell clients to keep asking that one basic question: ‘What problem are we trying to fix?’ In most cases, additive manufacturing can provide a solution; it’s just a matter of finding it. And once people manage to do that and have their first big success, that’s when they get really excited about the technology and become strong advocates for its use. It’s a fun process to watch.”

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