Employee Spotlight: Dan Ragozzino

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Dan Ragozzino has never come across a good reason to plant roots anywhere else. Closing in on his three-year anniversary with Patti Engineering, he has certainly planted roots at Patti Engineering. And after everything that happened in 2020, Dan appreciated the flexibility and transparency at Patti Engineering even more, as their tight-knit team was able to handle everything that happened very well given the circumstances. He also knows that he can count on being able to talk with any member of the team openly, whether it is a senior engineer or a member of the administrative staff.

Dan has worked on a variety of projects which have focused on a variety of technologies during his time with the company. As Dan says, “of course, our bread and butter is Siemens-centric automation systems,” and he has worked on projects involving the Siemens PLC and HMI systems, Siemens motion controls, in addition to UHF RFID and RTLS system integrations. He has also been involved in projects that center on developing Patti Engineering’s partnership with IFM Effector and their technology, including UHF RFID, IO Link, and their developing lineup of CODESYS products.

One of the more recent projects Dan worked on was for a specialty chemical product manufacturer in the Midwest that involved a large system with a lot of system integration. Dan was the lead engineer and had two supporting engineers to split the workload. The project included Allen Bradley PLC controls, motion controls, Allen Bradley and Siemens HMI development, Proface HMI development, Fanuc robots, a Keyence vision system, and Omron DeviceNet safety components. The project provided him with the opportunity to learn about a process and industry he had no previous exposure to, as well as work with technology he had not yet had an opportunity to work with.

The youngest of three, Dan’s older brother Matthew is an electrical engineer at Boeing, and his sister Emily works in biomedical engineering at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis. His mom, Linda, a retired RN, was hoping her three kids would be a doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer, and now it is a fun family joke that all three ended up being engineers. His dad, Joe, is also retired, and has worked in numerous fields over his career, starting out as an ASE certified mechanic.

When he isn’t at work, you can likely find him outdoors doing something. He enjoys biking, skiing, hiking, kayaking, camping, and archery, just to name a few. And he also enjoys recreational rifle marksmanship and hunting, and has been trying to work himself up to sign up for some competitive rifle shooting matches. He also loves learning new skills and has been teaching himself things such as basic machining skills, welding, woodworking, metallurgy, and blacksmithing. Dan also enjoys taking machines and electronics apart, learning how they work, and putting them back together, particularly older mechanical things, due to the incredible amount of craftsmanship and complicated mechanics inside.

A graduate of Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis, or IUPUI for short, Dan has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering technology. This is the first job he got out of college, and it has given him great opportunities to learn and grow as the company explores new technologies in order to provide better value for both the customers and partners. One of the things he was looking for in a job after graduating was not getting bored, and his job at Patti Engineering definitely fits the bill. Dan said the thing he likes most about working at Patti Engineering is “the variety of things I get exposed to” and he has “never gotten bored.”

Dan has been consistently challenged at Patti Engineering to learn new technologies and work with new systems in order to achieve project goals. Learning new skills, using them, and seeing the results in action are the most satisfying things he gets to do, both at work and with his hobbies. And as technology continues to evolve, Dan says, “there is tremendous value in having a career and an organization that constantly pushes its team members to find ways to leverage new things.”