Shane van Niekirk

MECHANICAL ENGINEER

Skills Overview

Shane is a technically driven mechanical engineer with experience delivering solutions across industrial and manufacturing sectors, working in roles including design, project, and production engineering. He has a proven ability to carry projects through their full life cycle, from initial concept through to commissioning and validation, often within complex or constrained operating environments. Self-motivated and adaptable, Shane takes pride in delivering robust and reliable engineering solutions across new and varied technical environments.

• MECHANICAL DESIGN – Shane has mechanical design experience across multiple industries, including FMCG equipment design, medical devices R&D equipment design, and high-volume manufacturing equipment continuous improvement design. He has completed mechanical design projects from concept through to manufacture and commissioning, working closely with controls engineers and electricians throughout the design phase to ensure mechanical, electrical, and controls elements integrate cleanly. Shane also has experience creating machine documentation, including machine manuals, guides, and pneumatic/electrical drawings. This varied experience makes him versatile and excited to learn and develop across more industries.
• PROJECT ENGINEERING – Shane has independently managed process improvement projects across high-volume manufacturing equipment. Due to the nature of the production environment, managing these projects required input from multiple stakeholders, including the production, planning, quality assurance, R&D, and OEM install teams. Ensuring alignment between all stakeholders was critical for delivering projects on time and in a compliant fashion. Shane also worked as part of an engineering team responsible for the project engineering element of a major site capital expansion, overseeing the design and commissioning of more than five machines. This involved design reviews with the machine designer and manufacturer, change control and management for requested changes, and risk mitigation to ensure machine changes were tested early enough to meet downstream deadlines.
• QUALITY AND COMPLIANCE – Shane’s background in the medical devices industry has shown him the importance of quality and compliance in ensuring engineering decisions are made with the safety of the consumer or user in mind, however far removed they may be from the shop floor. This experience carries over to multiple sectors, particularly where safety and regulation are of utmost importance.
• ANALYSIS – Working as a production engineer allowed Shane the opportunity to flex his troubleshooting ability using structured methodologies such as DMAIC. Often, he has found that problems on the shop floor are not the result of a single source. Scratching further than the surface often results in identifying the multiple factors that may be resulting in issues like yield loss and downtime. This experience gives him the foundation to solve similar problems in the future, or root them out altogether if identified in the design phase.

Project Experience