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Supplier engineering manager Brenda J. Petrilena, a ChE, has been working for the past year to build an engineering organization for Westinghouse’s revived nuclear power plant business. Last summer she moved from the automotive world of Ford Motor Co’s Rawsonville Plant in
Ypsilanti, MI to join the “nuclear renaissance” taking place at Westinghouse Electric Co in Monroeville, PA.
Westinghouse Nuclear Power Plants provides worldwide development and startup for the company’s advanced pressurized water reactor, the AP1000. Westinghouse, she notes, is working to find ways to make the capital costs of new nuclear plants more competitive in the energy marketplace.
Monitoring and mitigating
When Petrilena joined Westinghouse in July 2006 she started as a team of one. She’s built her team up to five engineers and growing. The team completes supplier evaluations, does capacity analyses and provides oversight of production efforts. “The people on my team are the experts. I’m here to guide them, develop them, and break down barriers. I leave the details to them,” she says.
Petrilena herself began by establishing and implementing a process to identify priorities and monitor and mitigate supply-base risks in purchasing and delivering nuclear components.
Learning the industry
Since joining Westinghouse, Petrilena has had to learn the industry as well as the technology of the AP1000 reactor design. She says she was able to get up to speed quickly thanks to “open communication from the people at Westinghouse and the knowledge of the management team.” She also had a lot of support from her assigned mentor, Marsha Bayne, plant manager at a Westinghouse manufacturing facility.
“I still meet with her monthly,” Petrilena says. “She’s extremely knowledgeable and really helped me understand our organization and corporate culture.”
Finding her field
Petrilena grew up near Pittsburgh, PA, the first techie in her family. She set out to be a veterinarian, but realized she had serious allergies to “just about every animal.” She got as far as a two-year degree in animal health technology, but her doctor advised her to stay away from the field.
So Petrilena found a job at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) as a technician in a cancer research lab associated with the ChE department. “The work in the lab led me to the decision to be a ChE myself,” she says.
She started evening school, and in 1992 completed an associate of science degree in physics at the Community College of Allegheny County, PA. She moved on to the University of Pittsburgh to work toward a BSChE.
Years of work
While going to school she continued to work at the lab, and later at Ameri-Shred Corp (Monroeville, PA), a paper shredder manufacturer, as a sales associate. The summer before her senior year she did a manufacturing engineering internship at Concurrent Technologies Corp (Johnstown, PA).
“By the time I graduated I had worked for many years, which was an advantage when I went for my first real engineering job,” she says. She lined up a job with Ford and started as soon as she graduated in May 1995.
Moving up at Ford
She began as an engineer in Ford’s supplier quality engineering department. “I was assigned to an area that used plastics and chemical processes,” she says.
She was the main technical interface with two dozen suppliers and also worked with engineering and purchasing teams. She traveled extensively, even when she was eight months pregnant. Her mentor, a business planner, “really helped guide me through career decisions and pushed me from my comfort zone,” she recalls with appreciation.
In 1997 she moved to supply planning associate, developing the position from the ground up. “It was a proactive approach with our supply base that required a lot of planning. I had to go to Europe to educate other organizations within the company,” Petrilena says.
The next year she became a design engineer, designing and launching new mechanical throttle bodies. “When you hit the gas you’re opening the throttle,” she explains.
She enjoyed transferring customer demands into product attributes. “When my design first came off the assembly line it was so exciting! When I met someone with a new a Ford I’d ask, ‘Can I look at your engine?’” she recalls with a laugh.
Next she became a business planner for electric vehicle systems. She developed and implemented business planning strategy for the new 42-volt systems department. She moved on to manufacturing engineer, responsible for installing and validating the first lean-cell process to assemble electronic throttle bodies. “I really enjoyed the technical assembly process and the environment on the shop floor,” she reminisces.
Engineering management
Petrilena had been working on an MS in engineering management, which she received from the University of Michigan in 2002. The next year she was promoted to production superintendent, responsible for daily operations, operator efficiency, overhead and financials and more for a dozen assembly lines producing 14,000 air-induction components a day.
“I learned to adjust my style depending on what area of the organization I was working with,” she says.
A year later she moved up to manufacturing engineering supervisor. “I worked hard to gain experience in every area, from quality to business planning to manufacturing to product design,” she says. In 2006 she became launch engineering manager, responsible for developing and putting into operation millions of dollars worth of manufacturing assembly equipment. She led a team of engineers that designed and built four assembly lines for vehicle air-induction components.
On to Westinghouse
She left that promising career because her father had developed lung cancer. She wanted a job in Pennsylvania to be near the family, and Westinghouse offered not only a good job but a flexible schedule to accommodate her needs.
The company was wonderfully supportive to its new engineering manager. When Petrilena’s father died at the end of the year, her organization sponsored a team in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life and raised $7,500. “It was a great way to honor my father,” she says.
Other aspects of the Westinghouse culture are also to her liking, like the company’s Women in Nuclear (W-WIN), a networking organization with 2,300 members.
Petrilena got to join a delegation to Washington, DC to meet with members of Congress and discuss their positions on nuclear energy. W-WIN also has a national conference which Petrilena attended. “It was great to go to a conference in my industry and be surrounded by 300 women. It was just fabulous!” she says.
Where is Petrilena going from here? She’s not sure yet, but she is looking forward to contributing to the revival of the nuclear industry and the Westinghouse involvement in the nuclear renaissance.
It’s best to “focus on doing a great job in your current position,” she says. “Take the time to build a solid foundation of experiences before you move up in the organization. You’ll be a much better manager. People need to know they can count on you.”
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