ISE Student Claims Levengood Award at John Deere Conference

When Amy Doroff left for a 13-week summer internship at John Deere’s Harvester Works plant in East Moline, she hoped to add real value to the operations there. She didn’t expect to be asked to solve a high priority project and be honored for her solution at the manufacturer’s global conference. 

A senior in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Engineering (ISE) at Illinois, Doroff along with fellow part-time student Andrew Borders, earned the Dan Levengood Excellence in Ergonomics Award at John Deere’s annual conference in late September, which brings together the organization’s leadership from around the world. The company-wide award is given to the top worldwide ergonomics contribution within John Deere and marks the first time that a project from the Harvester Works plant has earned the distinction.

Doroff helped develop a tool to install lock collars to make the assembly process a lot safer.

“The lock collar goes on a shaft to keep it from moving laterally,” explained Doroff. “The old installation process used a hammer and a drift, which has a lot of issues, the least of which is safety. It’s not safe for an operator to have a hammer in their hand any more than they really need to. I made them a tool that achieved that same goal of setting that lock collar without using a hammer.”

Getting to the solution is part of the story for Doroff, who is expected to graduate with a degree in general engineering in December 2015. John Deere engineers had been wrestling with ways to improve their design. Leaders within the plant decided to give Doroff a shot, hoping that a fresh approach might provide the solution they were looking for.

Doroff developed a passion for manufacturing and operations while working on a tray assembly line at a hospital with Advocate Health Care in suburban Chicago at the age of 16. Over the next four years, she worked as a tray line worker assembling patient food and working to assure strong quality.

She credits the experience in operations for providing the perspective that helped guide her to the award-winning solution.

In creating the solution, Doroff said, “I wanted us to fix a multitude of issues in one tool,” she said. “It felt like a big project to try to take a bite out of, but John Deere pushes you to be the quality they see in their products. They gave me such an incredible opportunity, and I like that they continued to push me to make a strong impact.”

After going through a pair of prototypes, Doroff helped developed something that worked better than the industry standard.

“I looked at the tool and asked, ‘How can we standardize this process?’” Doroff said. “Any time you can make it as standard as possible, you’re getting a better solution and each time a lock collar is installed, it’s going to be safer than the one we had before.”

The plant leaders informed her they were going to put the tool up for the Excellence in Ergonomics Award, citing the fact that the solution was applicable to the entire enterprise. Doroff presented alongside representatives who had been with the company some 30 years, but left before the winners were announced to get back to class. She got a call that evening informing her that her project had won.

“John Deere has some of the best innovators in the world,” Doroff said. “To just present at the event was an incredible honor. Then to find out we won is simply an amazing feeling. I never expected the type of experiences that John Deere would let me handle.”

Doroff also credits her experience as a student in ISE and her mentor, Sue Larson, assistant dean and director of Women in Engineering.

“The way I look at problems is a very ISE mentality,” she said. “I looked at this project from the business side, from the safety side, from every angle, that’s where general engineering is so important.”

Doroff plans to intern next summer at Whirlpool and eventually pursue an MBA. No matter what happens, however, she will always be an operator at heart.

“I like a well-oiled machine, so I thought engineering would be the best area for me,” she said. “I am a general engineer because I want the ability to look at all of these pieces in depth. I believe in relentlessly going after every project from every angle.”