Abstract
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)
Didactic Solutions Engineers are engineers who are involved in providing sales, marketing, training, and customer solutions of learning systems in an organization. The complexities attached to the nature of Didactic Solutions Engineers functions within an organization often create a sense of exhaustion, thus reducing their productivity and efficiency. The challenges are increasingly intensified by the rate of development of new technology. In less than a century, technology has evolved from the first industrial revolution to the fourth. Didactic and Learning Systems companies are growing part of the industrial business industry. Didactic focussed companies design, build and distribute learning systems equipment to address the skills gap in the engineering and technology field. The increased need for technological sales teams and client needs to stay abreast of technological development result in more pressure. Companies’ sales teams are put under pressure due to few resources resulting from the global economy and the subsequent increases in the footprint area that needs to be covered.
Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary approach that aims to solve complex problems by combining systems, subsystems and their components. Through a series of well-defined steps, Systems Engineering defines the customer needs and progresses further towards design synthesis, realization, optimization and validation of systems. Systems Engineering tools and methods can be used in different fields to optimize the outcome of a process, by the fact that attention is devoted to the entire life cycle of the systems. Traditionally, Systems Engineering has evolved independently and there are numerous tools and techniques available to address systems design issues.
This research study seeks to investigate the experiences of didactics companies outside South Africa and look at the daily activities of Solutions Engineer within Festo SA. A framework to optimize the function of a Solutions Engineer in didactic market will be designed based on those findings using Festo South Africa (SA) as a case study. For the derivation of the framework, data was collected using questionnaires that helped obtain relevant information on daily activities (sales, exhibition, marketing, tenders, project and technical solutions) from Solution Engineers within Festo SA and other didactic companies in the world. The collected data was analysed. Systems Engineering tools and methods were applied and from that, a framework was proposed to help Solutions Engineers with their daily work. In addition, two new alternative organograms were proposed in this study to be adapted to the proposed framework for future implementation to help the Solutions Engineers.