As the Project Engineer on this team, I worked on over twenty different games. My main responsibility was understanding the costs of each item and its components. This consisted of putting together cost estimates, reviewing vendor quotes, and assessing the feasibility and profitability of items. It was important to understand what materials and labor costed, so I had to constantly reference past quotes of similar items to get an understanding of general costs. Hasbro strongly utilizes its teams in Asia, called Hasbro Far East (HFE), for a lot of their developmental and production needs. It was important for me as an engineer in Rhode Island to have strong relations and communications with my counterparts in HFE. I often acted as a liaison between teams and communicated clearly the thoughts of the team and administrative information for products such as forecast, target costs, and logistics. Vendor quotes were often given to me from HFE to look over and make sure all costs were not overpriced and aligned with past costs to optimize the cost and therefore profitability of the item. Hasbro is a for-profit organization, and everything revolves around what things cost. I found that the Project Engineers have a very crucial role in the company by determining what products will be worth spending the company’s development time and resources on based on the item’s perceived profitability. With all this costing, I worked closely with the teams’ cost engineers to help better assess this profitability and assess costs.

          Furthermore, it was my responsibility to create specification documents for the factories. I had to work with designers, marketers, graphic designers, as well as other engineers to fully understand the components of the game in terms of size, material, and specializations. My specification documents guided the manufacturing process and had to be detailed and precise. It was my job to then relay this information to our factories in HFE or East Longmeadow, Massachusetts (ELM), as well as other manufacturers around the world. I had to answer all questions pertaining to the specification document and communicated any changes to the product along the way.

         When products were in development, models were sent to me to review with the team. In my six months, I was able to review models of all stages in the design process. They ranged from strictly looks-like or works-like models to pre-production samples. With each prototype review meeting, I worked alongside our Quality Assurance Engineer and the rest of the team to make sure everything looked and worked accurately. I greatly enjoyed testing the functionality of the prototypes and altering the design or problem solving where necessary. I would then send a report back to HFE or whoever made the item with the team’s comments and concerns.

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