Posts Tagged ‘Rockwell Collins’

By Dave DeWitte
The Gazette

Photovoltaic cells collect solar energy at the Indian Creek Nature Center in southeast Cedar Rapids. The current system was installed in July 2003. The nature center collects solar energy using photovoltaic cells on the roof, which is converted to usable electricity to power fans, computers, lights and freezers. The center sells some of its electricity back to Alliant Energy. Photo by Jim Slosiarek.

Reporting a company’s carbon footprint, Eric Woodroof says, is a lot like reporting your company’s taxes.

“How many of you enjoy reporting your taxes?” asked Woodroof, chairman of the carbon reduction manager program at the Association of Energy Engineers.

Nobody at Alliant Energy’s 2009 Energy Summit raised a hand at the Kirkwood Community College Continuing Education Center.

Enjoyable? Definitely not. But a growing number of companies are calculating and reporting their carbon footprint in a trend linked to concern over climate change. There are several reasons to be first in your industry to report the data, Woodroof said.

“Marketing is the biggest one,” said Woodroof, who is based in Atlanta. “Companies want to be first to use it in their marketing. If you’re first, you will always be able to say you were first.”

Carbon trading opportunities are another reason. In some industries, such as cement manufacturing, early reporters may qualify for “early action credits” that have significant economic value.

Alliant Energy strategic account manager Laurie Appleget (left) and Scott Reid, Harper Brush vice president of manufacturing, tour an energy-efficient lighting retrofit at Harper Brush in Fairfield in 2007. The project reduced energy consumption by 20 percent while yielding 20 percent more light. Photo courtesy of Alliant Energy.

Customers are demanding that suppliers become carbon-conscious, Woodroof said. “Wal-Mart is asking all of their Chinese suppliers to begin doing it,” said Woodroof, who has been to Taiwan and mainland China five times in less than a year.

To calculate its carbon footprint, Woodroof said a company must complete two of the three potential inventories of its greenhouse gas emissions.

SCOPE I consists of direct emissions from assets that a company owns or operates, such as its manufacturing plants, office buildings, trucks, cars and forklifts.

SCOPE II consists of indirect emissions from purchases of electricity, steam, heating and cooling.

The SCOPE III category, which is not essential, consists of all other indirect emissions from upstream and downstream sources. It could include such things as the carbon emissions generated by the companies that dispose of your company’s solid waste, and the carbon emissions of the companies that deliver the raw materials your company turns into its products.

A good place to find a protocol for carbon modeling is on the Web site of the California Climate Action Registry, www.climateregistry.org/

“It’s a great teaching tool and gives a lot of examples,” Woodroof said.

One of the most important concepts is the Global Warming Potential Factor. It works like a multiplier to calculate the climate change potential of different kinds of greenhouse gases. A pound of carbon dioxide, by far the most common greenhouse gas, has a Global Warming Potential Factor of one. The global warming potency of other gases differ tremendously. A pound of methane has a factor of 21, while a pound of the refrigerant HFC-23 has a factor of a whopping 11,700.

By comparing the Global Warming Potential Factors of various greenhouse gases, Woodroof says it’s easy to see that a company might be able to make a greater dent in the greenhouse gas problem by tacking one relatively small refrigerant leak, for instance, than switching an entire building to high-efficiency light fixtures.

Conversion tables also can be used to calculate the carbon impact of the electricity a company uses. The amount of carbon emitted in generating electricity varies in different regions by the kind of fuel and equipment used to generate power. In California, the carbon impact of generating a megawatt hour of electricity is 878.71 pounds. The impact is almost twice that amount in Iowa because most of the electricity is generated here from coal-burning power plants.

Woodroof says numbers such as megawatt hours and carbon pounds mean very little to the public or even most corporate executives. To make a persuasive case that greenhouse gas reduction projects be undertaken, he recommends translating them into functional equivalents.

He personally has sold projects by putting benefits in terms like “taking 240 cars off the road for a year,” or “the equivalent of planting 940 acres of trees.”

“Put what it’s worth in terms they can visualize,” he said.

Woodroof said the “240 cars off the road” comparison went over like a lead balloon with one company, which happened to be in the oil business. The 940 acres of trees comparison went over much better.

Alliant Energy gave 16 Excellent in Energy Efficiency awards at the summit to schools, businesses and other organizations.

“Climate change is at the forefront of everyone’s minds right now, and energy efficiency is one of the best ways to preserve the environment,” Senior Vice President of Energy Delivery Dundeana Doyle said.

Actions taken by the 16 organizations save enough energy consumption to reduce carbon emissions by 35,000 tons per year, Doyle said.

Recipients included Kirkwood Community College, General Mills, Nordstrom Direct and Rockwell Collins.

By Dave DeWitte
The Gazette

A doctorate from MIT and a strong background in avionics haven’t meant job security for Ed Wischmeyer of Cedar Rapids, who was laid off unexpectedly from Rockwell Collins in April 2008.

Ed Wischmeyer, who has a Ph.D. from MIT, was unexpectedly terminated from his job at Rockwell Collins in April 2008. Phot by Jim Slosiarek.

Wischmeyer has found that while the overall job market is bad, the job market for a 59-year-old principle systems engineer is even worse. Although it’s hard to prove anything, Wischmeyer suspects that his former employer and other companies are looking to trim payrolls by relying on younger, less experienced and lower-paid workers.

“It’s been frustrating,” Wischmeyer said. “When you’re as experienced and senior as I am, there aren’t as many jobs available at that level.”

A pilot for 35 years, Wischmeyer had worked in a cockpit design group at Boeing for three years and had five years’ experience designing systems to look at data from digital flight data recorders.

Wischmeyer may move back to the Southwest, where he lived before he took the job at Rockwell Collins.

“After the all-time-record low temperatures last winter, the near-all-time-record snowfalls last winter, an F-5 tornado and the all-time-record flood, I feel like I’ve done Iowa,” he said.

© Gazette Communications 2009

By Jamie Kelly
The Gazette

You have a shiny new BlackBerry, iPhone or other smartphone. But you need to be careful – the thing you bought to keep you connected could end up separating you from your co-workers.

People get into trouble using smartphones during meetings when they don’t know the corporate culture, according to Deanna Hurst, director of human resources at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa.

Deanna Hurst, UI Tippie College of Business

“The best bet is to turn it off and put it away,” she said.

Pam Tbrdy, manager of media relations at Rockwell-Collins in Cedar Rapids, said she tries to strike a fine balance.

Because she deals with reporters from all over who need information quickly, she’s constantly checking her BlackBerry. But, she said, she knows she shouldn’t be doing that during meetings.

“It’s challenging,” she said.

She’s found the best policy for her is to either turn off or leave behind her BlackBerry for some meetings. That way, temptation is removed.

Deborah Rinner, Tero International

The people running important meetings can help their own communication, too, said Deborah Rinner, director of international protocol and corporate etiquette at Tero International in Des Moines.

The meeting leader should make his or her expectations clear, she said, and ask people to turn off their phones and put them away. Then they can give people a break every 60 to 90 minutes to stretch and to check their messages.

Usually, even the most urgent messages can wait the hour that most meetings take, Hurst said.

And, if you’re expecting one you can’t wait for, tell the meeting organizer you might have to step out to respond. That way, she said, you’re being respectful of the others in the meeting.

And although you might think you’re being sly by sitting quietly and checking your BlackBerry, you’re not.

“It’s not as inconspicuous as people think,” Hurst said.

Ryan Wheeler, engineer in materials and processes at Rockwell Collins, manipulates a Wii remote as he demonstrates a virtual reality exercise used to develop manufacturing and maintenance processes. The images projected behind him on the screen are the images he is seeing in his head-mounted display / Gazette photo by Mark Tade

By Maggie Mills
For Gazette Special Sections

Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to mix work and play in a productive and stimulating environment. For employees who work in the Advanced Manufacturing Simulation Lab at Rockwell Collins, innovative technology not only advances business – it also makes work a lot more fun.

Jack Harris, director of advanced manufacturing technology, describes the lab as one that uses virtual reality and a number of other types of simulations to create virtual product models and even simulate their use for testing.  The ability to do all of this in “virtual space” allows employees to develop, implement and debug projects before they are released, which can be a great advantage for the company.

The lab’s technology can certainly be described as futuristic, but according to Harris, the idea came about three years ago, when gaming technologies advanced to a point where using them for business just made sense.  The application of the technology, for Rockwell Collins, includes such techniques as having assembly operators use a Nintendo Wii remote control to navigate a virtual assembly of a product.

“We’re hoping to integrate less costly solutions, like the Wii controllers, to replace the existing more expensive equipment we have now so that we’re able to have cost effective multiple extensions of the lab throughout the company,” Harris said.

The more budget-friendly gaming technology, coupled with cutting-edge applications, is exactly what Harris believes will appeal to the next generation of professionals. “They’re a gaming generation. They play with this technology everyday and they can walk into our labs, pick up the equipment, and work with it right away,” he said. “This is such a familiar technology for them, so the skills are already there.”

Story courtesy: The Gazette, National Engineers Week Special Section, 2009