Educating engineers for the development of product service systems (PSS)

Abstract

© 31st Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, ICAS 2018. All rights reserved.Embraer was founded in 1969 to accomplish the vision of the Brazilian government to have the capacity of designing and manufacturing airplanes. The company is organized in three business units: Commercial Aviation, Executive Jets and Defense&Security. In order to have recently graduated engineers prepared to tackle its future challenges, Embraer created in 2001 the PEE - Engineering Specialization Program in partnership with ITA - Aeronautics Institute of Technology. In 2016, more than 6,500 candidates applied for 30 positions. Since 2004, PEE is following the principles of CDIO initiative principles in both the selection of young engineer's process and curriculum design philosophy for the graduate program. As a strategy from Engineering and Technology Department of Embraer, the company needs to adapt its selection process and the curriculum for new engineers to fit to current and future challenges. For instance, from 2008 until now, the number of delivered executive jets dropped from 1315 to 700. Trying to avoid commoditization, the company looks for diversification, searching for new business opportunities. Therefore, offering more services is a natural source of new revenues. More than that, to develop a product and its services simultaneously (Product Service System - PSS from the literature) is a company current objective considering, for instance, the new digital era (Big Data, Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things). To understand how to develop a PSS for the executive jets owners is a major challenge. The other is to present suggestions on how to select and prepare the future engineers of Embraer to be able to conceive, design and implement Product Service Systems for the Executive Aviation Market. For that, a study is being conducted to analyze which competencies and profile are required for that challenge. This paper present as results some guidelines for the selection and education of future engineers of the company in the PSS context.

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