I was talking to a friend (he is also a process engineer) who works at another engineering company.
They do projects (Conceptual, Basic and Detail Engineering) for different chemical producers here in Germany.
What I found weird is that they don't have a team/department with mechanical engineers, but instead the tasks of a mechanical (static/rotating) engineer (like writing specifications, requisitions, technical/commercial bid evaluations, handling the vendor documentation/drawings, tender negotiations) are handled by the process engineers instead.
I can see why this might make sense in really small projects (let's say just replacing a pump) due to budgetary constraints, because it is difficult to justify having several people working on such a project. Another advantage of course is that a single person maintains the overview of the status of all pieces of equipment.
However I think that the necessary technical skills of a mechanical engineer are vastly different from what a process engineer is trained to do, so I was wondering if someone else could share their opinions and/or experiences about the responsibilities of process engineers in other engineering companies and if there are other pros and cons of not having a dedicated mechanical engineer (or at least someone with the proper specialist knowledge to check/approve the documents created by his/her colleagues) in a project.
P.S. Of course I think that with proper training, someone who studied mechanical engineering at the university can do the job of a process engineer and visa versa
Kind regards
Philipp
Edited by PhilippM, 10 June 2019 - 10:22 PM.