Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Latihan Industri Hujung Minggu 1

After I checked in for work on the second day, my supervisor discussed with me the details of my industrial training activities. Because Swedish Motor Assemblies Sdn. Bhd. is an assembly plant and does not involve themselves in the manufacture of plastics what so ever, all my knowledge of polymers arent of any use there. So he gave me the suggestion that I should do what all the other trainees do when they come to SMA..... (No not sit there, wander around and rot) I am going to do a small scale project alone, to gauge the manufacturing cycle time for 3 Volvo models, namely the S80, XC90 as well as the S40.

So he gave me a stack of files that I am supposed to work on by the end of the week. What I am supposed to do with those files then are to use them to update the PII list of the cars. The PII list (it is p i i not p 2) is a list that specifies each step a worker who assembles the car should do in order at each station. So the idea of this project is to time the time taken for each of the steps to be completed. Once that is done, the times used for each process can be used to streamline the assembly line in a process called "line balancing" which is to ensure that all the produciton lines finish the required steps at a particular station at the same time.

Basically, sometimes all the stations are already done with their work but the assembly line couldnt move foward because one station still has yet to complete the given set of tasks. This is a major wastage of labour as all the other workers are idle while waiting for that particular station to complete the task at hand.

With the data on the time used for EACH and every step involved in the assembly process, the tasks can be divided equally amongst all the 10 stations or so. This would not only streamline the process and increase efficiency, it would also mean that all the workers have the same amount of work to do, hence they wont get grumpy that they are doing more work than the others.

The first step in this project, is to update the PII list as I said earlier. This meant that i have just spent the first week of my industrial training doing Exel spreadsheet after spreadsheet of lists pertaining the code of each step in the assembly process. This is certainly a boring task i must admit, but I am glad for the air conditioned office that i get to work in, the linient supervisor and the other friendly colleagues in the office. Well it isnt exactly an office strictly speaking. Its called the CMM (Computerized Measuring Machine) department, room that holds the CMM machine, 2 Dell pcs and a host of people who work there who makes quite a bit of noise to relieve their working stress. A lively bunch of people then. Work aint that bad with them around. And since the boss of the Audit and Engineering department (the department which I am stationed at) is in the office beside the production line, she doesnt come by to breathe down my neck to make me work harder and faster than what I already am doing.

Truth be told though, I think 3 big 2 Horse power air cons to cool one CMM room is kind of overkill. I am not really afraid of cold weather. I could walk around the Genting Theme Park in my bermudas and t-shirt. I go for movies in that too. But my supervisor has even greater resistance to cold (in fact he likes it cold) always switches on all the other 2 air cons to full blast when he enters the room making it a chill room. I put on my jacket in the office while doing the spreadsheets as the cold is slightly more than i am capable of bearing.

A whole week of spreadsheets have passed along with some side activities such as attending the training that is conducted by the Audit and Engineering department head which the power point slides were prepared my yours truly and some wandering around to explore the factory (really liked the engine assembly section and the testing section) to kill boredom. But the one thing I found intresting is the male toilet.

I thought offensive graffitis was a high school toilet thing but apparently i was wrong. As the adage goes, boys will always be boys, I included some photos in this blog that gives you a sample of what one could see if we just steped in to the pang sai cubicles of the male toilet at SMA.



This picture is a picture of the back of the cubicle door. Some self explanatory racist remarks enshrined there and I dont think I need to explain much about this one..



This one is kinda amusing as he calls him self "bohjan tua" which i think means scandalous old man or something in Bahasa Melayu... Any one who knows the exact meaning of this please tell me in the comments section



Now this one is really a rendition of high school toilets where pictures of penises and vaginas adorn the school toilet walls. The picture above is depicts a woman getting penetrated by 2 penises that has been collaboratively depicted by more than one artist apparently, though I must say that too many cooks spoil the soup, too many artists produces inconsistent and bad looking art



This is a picture of a common genre of graffitis in the high school male toilet walls (football club superiority arguements) though it this photograph was really taken in SMA itself



This one is below the graffiti of the football club comment. The whole graffiti was actually "pergi hisap konek itu keling pariah" (go suck the cock of that keling pariah)... Racist, vulgar & offensive but strangely amusing if u consider the fact that this is the work and mentality of grown up guys



This one is a cross blaming and calling each other stupid in which makes them all stupid at the end of the day

Amusing isnt it? How grown up men in the factory still behaves like the typical form 4 high school punk. Ahh.... boys will always be boys......

Monday, April 21, 2008

Latihan Industri Minggu 1, hari 1

Today is the first day of industrial training and strangely i fell asleep during the working hours several times. This has been attributed to a lack of sleep that has snowballed since the night before i came to KL up till now. Another factor is the lack of mental stimulation during the training.

I got there half an hour early at 7 am (yes my working hours starts at 7.30 am) and signed in at the guard house. After waiting on the bench and getting sized up by the steady stream of managers and engineers signing parking and flashing their ID cards at the guard house, the HR manager finally reached the factory and she asked me to follow her to the meeting room where i waited some more.

There i was briefed on some pertinent issues and then assigned to an engineer which i would be sticking to throught the 10 weeks of training. The engineer is called Azril and he just started working for about 6 months.

He brought me around the factory for a bit, asked me about what I intended to do for training and then the senior engineer asked me to help her on her powerpoint presentation which i did as it was the first "real" work that i got for the whole day. Thanks to that i didnt dozed off.

2 meal breaks during working periods sounds good but the food at the canteen is so teruk that i dont really feel like eating hence i just scooped a bit here and there to tahan lapar a little.... Which made realized. Thats y Arzil didnt want to go for lunch.... He might hate the food there too.... Swt at least i will just have to endure it for at least 10 working weeks lar...

10 working weeks aint that long thanks to the economic slowdown, people arent buying that many volvos and the factory had to reduce production by putting in to place some "lay-off" days where i wont need to go to work on alternate fridays. I sure hope they add more of those in the near future after i know my way around KL more... Would like to lepak at One-Utama or MidValley or the Pavillion lar....

Overall, today was a boring and unproductive day. In fact i felt even more productive if i woke up at 12 pm and read MalaysiaToday, friend's blogs, checked my mail, eat lunch and watch anime during for the rest of the day during my study break. Did i really get in to the right place for latihan industry?