Emerging Leader

Sarah Koenig is associate director of manufacturing cost modeling for Pratt & Whitney, a division of Raytheon Technologies. In this role, she is responsible for the creation of manufacturing cost models to support partnership and supplier pricing negotiations.

She began her career in the manufacturing engineering development program at Pratt & Whitney, completing roles in both manufacturing and quality, becoming a quality engineer team leader, and completing supply chain and manufacturing rotations in the operations leadership program. She then joined Collins Aerospace, where she served as castings and machining lead, responsible for the team managing transitions into Southeast Asia, China, and India.

Koenig returned to Pratt & Whitney in 2016 as an industrial manager. She was soon promoted to deputy production chief, spearheading the industrialization of key configuration changes for the Next Generation Product Family, leading several cross-functional teams with members from engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and quality. She also created a playbook for industrializing future design changes, documenting the processes that she created to comprehensively engage disciplines across the enterprise for business-critical incorporations. The playbook is currently being deployed for a similar set of design changes on a related engine program.

In March 2020, the program office faced a daunting task: incorporating more than 200 design changes within 15 months. A cross-functional “war room” was formed to coordinate resources and priority across engineering, configuration management, and operations. Koenig’s status as design change implementation subject matter expert (SME) within operations made her the obvious choice to represent her function. Her ability to articulate next steps and consequences of delays, and present alternative solutions quickly elevated her as the SME for the entire war room team.

Koenig prioritized the list of design changes with both configuration management and operations while imparting to both groups a deeper understanding of each other’s processes. This allowed a redundant check to be eliminated, saving an average of four hours per design change at the bottleneck operation. The success of the war room would not have been possible without Koenig’s knowledge and proven record in multidisciplinary engagement.

An active SWE member since university and a SWE life member, Koenig served as her collegiate section president. Since moving to Connecticut, she has continuously held leadership roles in the Hartford Section, including president, vice president, outreach chair, section representative, and nominating committee chair. Outside of SWE, she serves on the board of directors of Camp Mujigae, a Korean heritage camp.

Koenig holds a B.S. in industrial engineering and a B.A. in French from the University of Rhode Island and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children and enjoys traveling, trying new recipes, and anything related to Disney.