Maria is a Senior Specialist of Global Engineering with Merck & Co., one of the world’s leading inventors and manufacturers of medicines and vaccines. Maria’s role is to oversee the improvements to both existing and new production facilities. Asides from a degree in chemical engineering or similar, Maria tells us the most impressive quality to land that first job is communication skills.
Transcript
My name is Maria Khouzam. I work for Merck. I'm a chemical engineer. I work in the Global Engineering Solutions Department. We mainly focus on making improvements on existing facilities and new production facilities for vaccines and biologics. We use Lean Six Sigma methodologies to make the processes more efficient and to end, for both the existing and new facilities. We interact with a lot of different groups from supply chains to operations to research, to really bring forward a design that is fitting for both the business need but also for the patient and the customer at the end of the day. For existing production, I get basically called in when something is either not going correctly, we need to expand capacity, or we need to improve certain things. So I get called in for these pieces. We do some analyses. We make sure that we're gathering all the data that we need. And once that happens, we go back to our internal customers, if you will, and deliver the recommendations that we have. The other scenario is working on the new facilities. And that's a little bit more challenging because as opposed to existing where you have data to rely on, for the new facilities you actually don't have a lot of data. You're creating the data as you go. And taking in assumptions, right? So we have to make sure that we're making assumptions that are realistic and communicating those. And for that, we get involved in the very early phases of the project when the inception of the idea we need a new facility for X product, up until maybe the early phases of the design phases. So we make some recommendations in the beginning, and then after that, design kicks off and they'll take it from there.
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