Project Unity

By the late 1990s, France’s Groupe Schneider (as they were then) had acquired a stable of electrical distribution and control companies, such as Square D and Modicon in the US, and AEG and Telemecanique in Europe. 

In the industrial automation business, I was selected as one of fourteen engineers worldwide appointed to a multinational task force responsible for defining Schneider Electric’s next generation automation products.  At least 6 separate product lines needed to be rationalized down to 1.

After the international kickoff, I led a team of 13 developers in the US, and held regular design sessions with colleagues in France and Germany.

Our innovative approaches improved quality and reduce development time, such as automatically generated database schemas, data-driven code and configuration generation.

In the initial stages of organizational integration, we defined the combined product architecture, specified common and market-specific product features, (under-) estimated the effort and tasks to repartition the R&D teams, and created an initial blueprint for international multi-site development.

The project began with 14 people in June, became 44 people in September, and 144 people the following April.  That kind of scaling presents its own challenges; each person represented a small but important piece of this huge industrial firm, and their business needs still had to be met while all the rationalizing was happening.

This project was mainly C++ on Windows (and PowerPoint!).