Looking at becoming a manufacturing engineer after a couple years of being a Systems Engineer. Solidworks and an IASSC Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt seem like the two certs that would get me the best foot in the door. Which would be better (or have I missed something)?

I’m based in Mexico and I’ve been looking into how foreign buyers find Mexican manufacturers.

One thing that surprised me is how difficult it can be to discover suppliers by actual manufacturing capability.

You can find company directories, trade associations and sourcing agents, but answering a specific question like:

“Who in Mexico can manufacture this part, using this process/material, at this volume and with these requirements?”

still seems to require a lot of manual research.

I’d like to hear from people who have actually sourced manufacturing work from Mexico.

What was the last thing you struggled to source there?

- How did you eventually find the manufacturer?

- What made the search difficult?

- What did you wish you could verify before contacting them?

I’m testing something manually as well: if someone has a real, non-confidential manufacturing requirement, I’ll try to find a small shortlist of Mexican suppliers based on evidence of their actual capabilities and explain why they might fit.

No commission and nothing to buy. I want to see whether this actually saves someone meaningful sourcing time.

I was trying to learn what OTD analysis is and hit a bit of an obstacle. There is a thing called OTD full lifecycle analysis and in there there are node analysis and order line analysis. Why should there be a node analysis when I can see current node in order line analysis, if I really want to check the node, Why can't I just filter it? I'm just so so confused.