Steel sections racked in a fabrication works

Engineering leadership

Two people, and the reason the advice and the manufacture agree with each other.

Why this page exists

Engineering advice is only as good as the engineer giving it.

The engineering at Van Driel is led by a Chartered Engineer, working alongside a production lead who has to make what is designed. Both are named here, because a customer buying engineering judgement is entitled to know whose judgement it is.

Most engineering websites describe a capability. Fewer name the people who hold it, and in this trade that omission is doing work, because it is a great deal easier to imply depth than to put a name and a professional registration against it.

Both have spent the greater part of their careers here: more than 50 years of combined experience within Van Driel Engineering. That is not a statistic for its own sake. It is why an assessment made at the drawing stage tends to hold when the job reaches the shop floor.

What follows is specific: who leads the engineering, who leads the manufacture, and how the two connect. That connection is the proposition, and it is the reason the advice and the finished article tend to agree with each other.

Mark Van DrielCEng MIET

Engineering & Technical Lead

Mark is a Chartered Engineer and the principal engineering lead behind Van Driel’s engineering consultancy work. Where an enquiry arrives as a problem rather than a drawing, it is his assessment that turns it into something that can be designed, priced and made.

The work spans requirement review, technical assessment, concept and design development, and design for manufacture, taking an engineering requirement through to a deliverable solution rather than to a drawing that somebody else has to make sense of. That last distinction matters more than it sounds. A design produced by someone who has never had to cut, form, weld or fixture the result is a design with unpriced assumptions in it.

What Chartered status represents in practice is not a specialism but a standard: assessed competence in applying engineering principles to problems that have no textbook answer, and personal accountability for the judgements that follow. It is a registration held by an individual engineer, and it is the reason a consultancy enquiry here is answered by someone who will put their name to the answer.

RegistrationCEng (Chartered Engineer)
InstitutionMIET (Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology)
QualificationsONC, HNC, HND
LeadsEngineering consultancy, technical problem solving, design development, design for manufacture
With Van Driel since2002

Engineering consultancy Talk to an engineer

Julian Upton

Production Lead

Julian leads the production side of the business: the point at which an engineering requirement or a drawing package stops being a proposal and becomes steel on a bench.

Production engineering is the discipline that decides whether a design is economic. Cutting and forming sequence, weld access, fixturing, distortion control, the order in which an assembly has to be built so that the last joint is still reachable. None of it appears on a general arrangement drawing, and all of it determines what the job actually costs. It is also the knowledge that makes the manufacturing review stage of a consultancy engagement worth having rather than theoretical.

In practice that means the workshop is represented in the conversation early, not handed a drawing at the end of it. A detail that is awkward to make gets raised while it is still cheap to change.

RoleProduction Lead
LeadsProduction engineering, fabrication and manufacturing delivery, manufacturability
With Van Driel since1997

Manufacturing capabilities Send a drawing

01ProblemWhat it has to doMark
02EngineeringAssessment and optionsMark
03DesignCAD to manufacturing intentMark
04ManufactureIn our own worksMark & Julian
05InstallationFitted on your site, UK-wideJulian

The overlap at stage four is the point of this page. Manufacturing review is where a design either survives contact with a workshop or does not, and it is the stage a consultancy without one cannot perform. Here it is a conversation between two people who work in the same building, rather than a drawing posted to a supplier who was not in the room when the decisions were made.

In practice

What this actually changes for a customer

Nothing on this page is unusual in a large engineering business. In a company of this size it is unusual, and it is worth naming what it buys you.

01
The advice already accounts for the making
A recommendation is not signed off until the person who would have to build it has looked at it. That happens before you see it, not after you have committed to it.
02
One accountable conversation, not a relay
There is no handover between a consultant, a design house and a fabricator, because there is no commercial boundary for a problem to fall down.
03
Someone will tell you when the answer is no
A registered engineer carries personal accountability for the judgements they make. That cuts both ways, and the useful direction is this one: if a proposal is a bad idea, or if the work needs a structural engineer, a metallurgist or a coded shop, you will be told.

An important distinction

Chartered Engineer is an individual professional registration, held by Mark personally. It is not a company certification, and nothing on this page should be read as one. Van Driel Engineering Ltd is not certified to ISO 9001 or EN 1090-1 and does not hold formal welder coding; the welding and structural steel pages set out exactly what that means for scope. Where a contract requires a certified regime, tell us at enquiry. It is a scope question, and it is better raised before the quotation than after the delivery.

The engineering, and the people who do it

If you have a problem rather than a specification, the first technical discussion is free and it is with one of the two people on this page.

Talk to an engineer Engineering consultancy