CMS Electracom - Work Experience
From Jan 2020 - Feb 2021, I worked for CMS Electracom as their Design Intern
Beginning on a full time fixed contract as an intern, then moving to a permanent part time role, I worked at the CMS office in Kings Park.
CMS Electracom is a softwiring and electric product company. World leaders in their niche, CMS develops high end office electrical infrastructure for businesses, retail, and many unique spaces. Their portfolio is substantial, see it here:
https://cmselectra.com/projects/
My university campus was integrated with CMS designs throughout, of which I’d found myself praising before even learning of CMS, further peaking my interest in designing with the company.
Designing at CMS
As a design opportunity, my internship was fantastic. CMS oversaw their entire product design process, as much of the products are manufactured under the corp’s warehouse in Melbourne, injection molding facility in South-East Asia, or in partnership with Chinese companies. Because of this the design team oversaw the entire process, which was a somewhat unique opportunity to be a part of as an intern.
My role was as an insert into the current dynamic and assisting with outgoing work and projects. Much of the work the design team had was non-project focused. CMS provides customized orders on demand, and generally each order is unique enough to justify its own drawing. This was a large portion of the work I did at CMS.
My skills with preparing designs for manufacture sharpened tremendously over the year, especially with the oversight of my colleagues. Attention to detail was vital, and developing processes to run checks on each drawing and to produce them efficiently was an important part of my development as a designer at CMS.
Custom orders for the most popular products such as Athena II (pictured) was a majority of custom orders I drafted drawings for, amongst many other products and categories, including other power rails, floor boxes,
Through this experience I learned electronic products back to front, as well as standards, designing for mass manufacture, and different design processes which occurred between projects at CMS.
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Power Rail Research
During and between design work, I’d be off doing pre-production research. The processes here utilised software/electrical testing products and recording a large amount of data per item. I’ve never done so much data entry for a design after it was prototyped, but CMS is thorough.
Other forms of design research occured at this stage too, such as testing prototype’s resistance to force, exact colours and textures of injection molds, etc.
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Product Design Work
Occasionally I’d be given design work. This was in the form of facilitator products, or in assistance to another designer on larger projects.
See below for e.g. of a product design I’d be tasked - THD series sheet metal bracketing system. Products like this are manufactured in Melbourne, thus the design office is very close with fabrication - invaluable to the design process.
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Product Testing
While I was at CMS, the reasons why design research was so important occasionally showed up in a product. Below is a gas-strut based monitor arm, of which came from the factory with manufacturing issues.
Part of my role was diagnosing and documenting product issues. It was a surprisingly interesting part of the design process!
Solidworks Experience at CMS.
CMS Utilises Solidworks PDM to work collaboratively. It’s extremely in-depth, and was a small learning curve. All designs and drawings are done in Solidworks. The majority of CAD work I engaged in during university was using solidworks, so I was able to adapt to the design processes at CMS fairly quickly. Solidworks is powerful but clunky, so I’m glad to know it so well, as I can adapt to other leading CAD programs with ease (e.g. Autodesk, Rhino).
Spending 6+ hours on Solidworks on any day at CMS took me from good to great with CAD, and I’m grateful for the experience.