Hi, I am Sayed Shakir Hussain, have been working at Flex, Chennai, India as a Product Engineer since August 2015. While in the final semester of my undergraduate studies I was accorded the opportunity to work with Ready LED Lighting. I joined Ready LED Lighting in January 2013 as an "Engineering Trainee" and based on my exceptional contribution on research & development on Solar and LED lighting products, I got elevated as "New Product Development Engineer" within a span of just 6 months.
Academic Background[edit | edit source]
I obtained my undergraduate degree (B.Tech) in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Veltech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology in 2013. Prior to B.Tech, I also completed a 3 years Diploma in 2009 in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Silchar Polytechnic, which is one of the college under Directorate of Technical Education Assam. During my undergraduation, I also earned a Certificate Diploma in Robotics.
Work Experiences[edit | edit source]
Product Engineer at Flex Ltd. Chennai, India (Aug 2015 till date)[edit | edit source]
As a Product Engineer I have been supporting different business partners and customers from different domains (Consumer, Automotive, Medical etc.) on a bunch of activities such as Benchmarking and Competitor Analysis, Market Research, Teardown analysis, Value Engineering, Schematic Analysis, Cost Reduction, Work Instructions, FMEA and Control plan.
Achievements and Major Projects[edit | edit source]
- Cost Reduction of various products from Customers: I was responsible for looking into the cost Bill of Materials and target components with higher costs to find suitable alternates. Approaching suppliers to get quotes for all alternate components based on the annual demand and select those with competitive price than the existing components. Also, identify areas in the Schematics to replace them with an economical solutions. Within a span of just 6 months I was able to save approximately 500K USD per annum and as a result I was highly appreciated by customers.
- Lean Projects: I have also initiated and completed several process improvement projects and internal kaizens and those results in drastic cost savings in the manufacturing process which results in achieving the Lean Green Belt certification.
- NPI activities for a Automotive customer: I was invited by Project Lead from Flex Austin, USA back in 2018 to assist them in setting-up Automatic production line and creating Work Instructions for several products. My work had been highly appreciated by customer as well as the Business development team.
- NPI activities for another Automotive customer: Visited Flex Milpitas, CA, USA in 2017 to support NPI activities for LiDAR products. Apart from supporting NPI activities, I identified that the manufacturing process of a sub assembly of LiDAR product having high cycle time. I have designed and deployed a new fixture and reduced the cycle time by 70%. The customer found this idea very innovative and cost effective and appreciated the entire team.
- Achieved Platinum award for outstanding performance during NPI support for a customer project in Flex Austin, USA in 2016. Also received appreciation from customer as well as Business development team for the same.
- I was invited by Flex Louisville, Kentucky, USA in 2016 to support Process Engineering activities. That was great success as I was able to help them identify different issues occuring in the production line and reduced failure rate from 77% to just 9%.
New Product Development Engineer at Ready LED Lighting, Chennai, India (January 2013 to August 2015)[edit | edit source]
Based on my commendable performance in the final semester project (Remote Video Survillence System), I was accorded the opportunity to work as a part of Research & Development team at Ready LED Lighting. I was working on different LED lighting products such as Bulb, Tube lights, Solar Street light, MPPT charge controller & Solar Inverter. I have successfully designed 20 products by doing online research and evaluating different products from markets. All those products I developed were certified by different Agencies such as BIS, UL, CE etc.
Achievements and Major Projects[edit | edit source]
- Solar Street light (LED): Based on my experience I gained while doing some projects at home, I was selected to do research and develop a 20W Solar street light with LED as light source. This was my first experience with Solar products and it was one of the most exciting project I ever worked. I was able to develop an MPPT solar charge controller with a solar tracking mechanism and developed a protoytpe within 3 months. This was highly appreciated by R&D manager as well as Marketing team.
- Awarded as "Best Performer of the Year 2013” for develping 15 LED products in a year.
Interests[edit | edit source]
Right from my childhood I had a key interest in electronics engineering, I was determined to become an electronics engineer. As I grew older, my enthusiasm to know electronic devices exhaustively grew stronger as well. I always tended to dismantle them at every opportunity I could’ve ever grabbed, to see what is inside. Some of them I was able to re-assemble and they worked perfectly fine, whilst majority of them were got damaged. With the help my Science teacher, I started doing some small projects at school and even I bought some small tools such as screwdriver, soldering iron, voltmeter etc. to continue exploring these devices and created a mini laboratory at home. Most of the fundings were from my pocket money and some of them even gifted by my teachers.
My first encounter with real world engineering problem was when our team at the university opted to do our final semester project on “Remote Video Surveillance System”. This project was to monitor any movement in a designated area with a number of cameras installed at different locations. Whenever a movement is detected by camera, it will capture an image and save it to the local memory and send the location co-ordinate to a particular mobile number. The major challenge given by our Project Mentor was, what if the location is remote and there is no power. Being amateurs with little experience, this was indeed a very daring project for all of us. We decided to use Solar Panel to power up all circuits and cameras and used batteries to store energy for nights. Finally, we constructed the entire design from the scratch. Simultaneously, we used software's like Proteus Simulation to evaluate the design, finally we built the prototype and successfully completed our project.
At this time after gaining a lot of exposure in the field of electronic product design and development, I am highly interested to deep dive and find some alternative Photo-voltaic materials or sources which are cost effective and affordable. In this era of Artificial Intelligence and Automotive vehicles, still many rural area in my country is out of power, which is very challenging for the peoples living in those areas. They don't have the option of using fans or AC's during summer, using lights during night, they can't work at night especially the farmers are unable to use modern electric machines, even they find it difficult to travel at night. Internet is not even reached them and my dream is to see them having all these facilities like what we have in the cities.
