Andy is an Engineering Services Manager with Phoenix Integration. With a doctorate in aerospace engineering and extensive experience as an aircraft design engineer, Andy now works as an engineering services manager for Phoenix Integration, a software development company that creates and manages a “software framework for creating and automating multi-tool workflows and optimizing product design.” Andy tells us that one of their clients uses the Phoenix software to calculate the fuel needed for supply runs to the International Space Station. Find out how to leverage an engineering background into a managing career!
Transcript
So my name is Andy Ko. I am the Engineering Services Manager at Phoenix Integration. Phoenix Integration is a software company. We produce software to help engineers automate their processes, to make things faster, help them do things quicker with less effort. So I manage a team of engineers that are customer-facing, so we go to the customer and we help train them in our software. We also do demonstrations to kind of show what our software can do. And occasionally we do projects, small little projects to help customize our software for what they needed to do for their particular application. We usually start off with actually the pre-sales process. So we start the communication and the relationship there, so we meet up with them, we introduce what our software does, give demonstrations, talk to the engineers, see where their problems are. And from then on, we probably do a demonstration with them, in the sense of we pass them the software for a little while and work with them to see how it fits in the organization. At that point in time, hopefully they would see the value in our software and purchase it. Then we'd come in and train their staff in how they use the software and deploy the software, we follow it through. Occasionally, they would also pay us to do special projects to customize what it is. So that could take anywhere from a month to three months to kind of help customize and deploy well. Once that's done, we follow up with them, depending on their needs, and then we kind of have a general support process where they can call us for help or for questions. We work with a major aerospace company to help them, our software is used to help them calculate the fuel that's required for the resupply missions to the International Space Station. So every time they send a cargo ship up to the space station they have to run our software through the analysis to make sure that they have enough fuel so that it gets there and then returns back on time. So we're very proud of those projects that actually make a difference.
Download transcript