FROM BAKING CAKES TO BAKING BRICKS:
ONE WOMAN PERFECTING THE RECIPE FOR BOTH

For those who doubt that baking a cake is women's work, the National Engineers Week Committee would like to introduce Lee H. Orosco.

When Proctor & Gamble makes a cake, the last thing they want is a flop. But, that's exactly what they were getting all too often when Orosco, working as a tester on the cake production line, reported that many of the cakes could not make the cut of P&G's ten standard quality indicators. So, the company pulled the engineer off the production line and directed her to get to the bottom of the problem.

According to the engineers committee, Orosco's work is typical of the varied, but critical role engineers play in everyday life, the message at the heart of National Engineers Week, February 22-28.

Orosco's directive was simple, but finding a solution proved complex. As any competent baker knows, you can't rush excellence. So, as Orosco conducted extensive research of Proctor & Gamble's entire baking process, 30 workers stood idle, two-and-a-half tons of cake mix never got poured, and a huge slice of the nation's Angel Food cake industry came to a two-month halt. As might be expected, Orosco's actions left a few of her colleagues piping hot.

"I had people coming up to me, calling me a little upstart engineer, wondering what did I know about a test that had been successful for over 30 years," says Orosco, who is a member of the Construction Specifications Institute, co-chair of 1998 National Engineers Week. Undaunted, however, Orosco intensified her research and finally found the culprit. Turns out, P&G's testing method was somewhat half-baked.

Until the engineer began her research, Proctor & Gamble used two different quality assurance tests. But, Orosco identified one of the tests as inherently flawed and recommended that it be dropped entirely and, instead, administer the remaining test twice at different stages of the process. This technique proved a better standard to measuring cake quality and soon Angel Food cakes were rising to the occasion again.

Orosco's work was far from over, though, when her next charge took her to a baking job of an entirely different matter. In short, for those who doubt building a house is women's work, the National Engineers Week Committee would like to introduce Lee H. Orosco.

Trained as a civil engineer, Orosco was working for an independent construction material testing consulting company in the Southwest United States when several suppliers of adobe bricks came to her with an enormous quality control dilemma. Though popular for home-building, nearly 60 percent of all adobe bricks delivered to construction sites had to be refused because they couldn't pass basic construction standards.

Adobe is based on a centuries-old method of mixing straw and clay and then baking the mixture, originally in the sun, but eventually in ovens. Yet, as adobe moved into the modern era, its recipe varied widely. The exact ratio of straw to clay had never been established, nor had the specific baking temperature or duration of baking been firmly laid out. The result was the rejection of more than half of all bricks and the waste of workers' time as they waited on second, and sometimes third shipments.

To solve the problem, Orosco met with a wide range of adobe suppliers and studied their methodology. She tested what worked, what didn't and why. Next she created an outline of consistently successful techniques for the best bricks. From there, she developed guidelines for the Construction Specifications Institute, which eventually created the CSI Adobe Specifications Guide.

The Construction Specifications Institute formulates standards for an incredible variety of industries involved at every level of construction, from the blades of an exhaust fan to the pitch of a roof to refrigerants that cool a building.

And just as CSI works with materials as old as adobe, it's also at the cutting edge of the most modern technologies. Orosco's latest project, for example, is designing the entire infrastructure for the Intel Corporation's new 220-acre community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Now the engineer oversees everything from the plotting of power supplies to the refinement of traffic patterns.

And if problems arise, Orosco feels confident she'll be able to make things right. After all, she's one engineer who's had plenty experience mixing it up and setting it straight.

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