Field Applications Engineer
-Daniel Dillon
A Field Applications Engineer is a person with an engineering education who possesses additional training, experience, and expertise who provides technical support a manufacturer of technical products. Most Field Applications Engineers (FAE) work directly for a manufacture of products but it is not uncommon for an FAE to work for a sales organization that either is the manufacturers’ representative or manufacturers’ distributor of technical products.
The FAE often will provide support, training, and other services to potential customers or clients both in advance and after a sale. The primary focus of an FAE is on pre-sales support leading to the customer or client becoming comfortable enough with the product and how it applies to their particular unique needs that they will purchase and use the product.
Frequently the FAE will handle a wide variety of products offered by the manufacturer and cover a large territory for his employer, spending much of his time visiting with customers at their offices. Usually the FAE works with Sales Representatives and others within his company in order to provide service to the many customers in his region by working with their engineering staff. Smaller organizations or those with less focus on customer support, often lack the resources to provide the field team with a group of technicians and applications engineers who support their field efforts. In these types of companies, the FAE will also spend some time doing design work, creating prototypes, troubleshooting, or debugging customer designs or applications targeted for a customer’s need. Ultimately, the FAE targets his efforts at providing or arranging for whatever technical support is required to win a sale and keep the customer happy with the technical aspects of the product.
After the purchase is made, the FAE will often provide further support to ensure proper integration of the product into the particular design or development that the customer is working on. Sometimes customers will incur problems or technical difficulty when working with a product they have purchased. The FAE is the best resource both for the manufacturer as well as the customer to help solve the problem. FAEs are in the unique position to have a good knowledge both of the customer’s product and needs as well as the manufacturer’s products specifications, capabilities, and limitations. This is a major reason why the FAE will often be the primary person responsible for addressing the problem and gathering the necessary resources to provide support and solve any problems or difficulty that arises with the customer’s use of the products handled by the FAE.
The FAE’s role of technical and sales liaison between manufacturer and customer demands a particular skill set that go well past just the engineering skills, mathematics, communications skills, and strong technical product knowledge. The FAE must work in the field without supervision, arranging his own travel, creating and organizing meetings and frequently doing technical presentation. It is common for the FAE to work with sales representatives or distributors in their customer-support activities. Excellent language and communications skills are required along with a strong and professional personality. The FAE regularly will give presentations of information to a small audience comprised of a mix of extremely technical people and extremely non-technical people making the ability to communicate highly technical information to both very technical and very non-technical people an essential language and communication skill. The effective FAE is able to explain technical specifications to a marketing manager or commodity manager as well as he can to the engineers who will design the part into the customer product.
Daniel Dillon is President of Dillon Technical Associates, Inc. http://www.dillontechnical.com and is a manager at Frontline Management, Inc. Sensors and Systems Division. Daniel spent many years working as a Field Applications Engineer for a European semiconductor company handling Western North America.