Philip Smith Email & Phone Number

Inca designs and builds industrial ink-jet printers, sold worldwide. At Inca, I am a project manager within the New Product Development group. The job of “project manager” at Inca is mainly about being chief designer and system architect of the product being designed, in addition to controlling the project timescale, resources etc. In 2008 I was given the responsibility to lead the design of Inca’s next generation printer. This printer, the Onset S20, has since become Inca’s leading product, and has sold over 200 in its various generations. A significant innovation was to break away from Inca’s traditional thinking of aligning the printheads during production. Instead the printheads are aligned on the finished printer by printing and analysing test patterns to determine the required position. This allowed much better alignment than the previous method of aligning in the factory, resulting in better print quality. The printer could also be installed in under half the time of the previous one as it used a telescopic motion for the print head gantry. This meant that all the high precision parts could be shipped in a single piece and therefore maintain alignment. These and other innovations kept the cost down, and resulted in a very successful product, that after some updates is still Inca’s biggest selling printer today, 8 years later.See www.incadigital.com

Royston

Initially at TAP, my role was as project manager and lead engineer of projects to design, build and supply high value (typically a few million pounds) automated equipment systems supplied into pharmaceutical companies’ research departments. This required definition of the specification with the client, leading the design and build teams, and ensuring successful installation on site. One project of this type was installed in Cincinnati. Early in this project I frequently flew to visit the client for a few days at a time, to agree the specification, project timescales and costs. Because of a company reorganisation, I then changed role to technical manager, concentrating on the technical and design leadership side of the projects. Finally I worked in the Technology group, which works on the research and development of new ideas for future machines, i.e. before a system concept is sold to a client. An example of this was to design and build a technology demonstrator to pick and place miniature test tubes at 5 per second. This position also included reviewing of other projects, producing initial concepts for new projects and quotations, as well as introducing new technologies and techniques into TAP.