The beauty of Engineering

To solve problems, engineers often need to think outside the box. They also need to get to grips with the nuts and bolts of business: soft skills and customer needs. This year’s European Global Product Realisation (EGPR) project is challenging 40 engineering students from five European universities to do just that. That and selling more male grooming products.

The task for students is to research, develop, design and manufacture a prototype of a new point of purchase (POP) display for their “client”, Kesslers International, a high-tech company that designs and manufactures POP displays for brands such as Christian Dior. The project teaches the students an invaluable lesson, says Dr Ahmed Kovacevic, a senior lecturer in mechanical design at City University, London. “They learn how to behave in an industrial environment, working on a sales-driven project,” he says. It offers a glimpse of life at a multinational, where soft skills count as much as hard data.

“The students have to work in an international group, overcoming communication difficulties, assigning responsibilities, sharing ideas and opinions and presenting their work during common sessions,” he says. The virtual teams have only four months to deliver the prototype.

Getting under the skin of the project has been exciting, according to Mahesh Jeshani, an aeronautical engineering student at City University taking part in this year’s EGPR project.

“Men have the will to spend but they are not willing to ask questions [about grooming products],” he says. The groups hope to translate this insight into an interactive POP display that will appeal to men and turn them into customers.

“It doesn’t matter what the project is,” says Jeshani, who is undeterred by the soft image of the beauty business. “You would say that grooming isn’t engineering, but engineers have to learn how to manage, lead and put their research to work as any other professional does. Engineering is a very wide profession.”

George Kessler, the joint group deputy chairman of Kesslers International, is hopeful that they too will learn something from the project. A fresh perspective can be powerful. “There is an off-chance that we get a disruptive innovation,” he says. “Something that is completely new and completely different... that would be great.”

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