The End of Industrial Training

Okayy... I know it has been a few ice ages ago since I last blogged but heres the thing...

THERE WASNT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT AFTER THE FIRST 4 WEEKS OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING!!! WHAT THE HELL COULD I BLOG ABOUT? e.g. This week was a routine week. I went to the production line and with my trusty stopwatch and clipboard and measured the cycle time.... every day i measure the production lines cycle time.... after work i would key in this data in to Excel spreadsheets blah blah blah.... NOOOOOO I DUWAN TO WRITE A BLOG LIKE TAT!!!

Ahem.... Now that i have cleared my throat a little on that issue, let me try to summarize as much as I can think about the final 7 weeks of my 11 week long industrial training.... Hmmm lemmme see.... Well there was an endless pile of spreadsheets, there was the final presentation in which for the first time in my life, i didnt know what to present in front of the whole line up of engineers on the production floor leaving them with an impression that I SUCK at presenting but the truth is there was nothing to present at all as all I did was collect data by pressing the stopwatch and recording it on paper and transferring the measured data to Excel spreadsheets, wrote my industrial training final report in the final few days there, and the last day of work was spent looking at the engine testing department giving the S80 engines a full power run and approving documents.

Within the final few weeks though, there was this interesting "training" on Volvo's image rebranding which basically sums up why Volvos couldnt sell as well as Mercedes or BMWs. In this "training" we were told that Volvos problem was its brand image as it wants to be a premium car brand but couldnt seem to succeed in doing so. Failing to do so, it is sandwiched in a really unfavourable position where it in the middle of nowhere, not premium but not cheap.... A bit of a more expensive Toyota Camry price range but much cheaper than BMW. As it is not perceived as a premium car brand, it is naturally crossed off the list of cars to consider when buying a new car, as in when you buy a car, even before you think about how big of a car you want, you would first decide on whether or not to buy an expensive car, or just settle for a cheap car right?

So during this decision process making, you would cross out Volvo right after you decided you wanted an expensive car as Volvos arent premium and expensive cars. And if you decide on cheap cars instead, you would still cross out Volvos as they are kind of expensive. Hence being in the middle of both classes would really put a company in a disadvantageous and even possibly dangerous market position where your products would get crossed out of the list of possible choices to consider when buying a car.

For example, lets say you have RM 200,000.00 and you want to buy a car with that money. Which one you would rather have? A Toyota Camry / Honda Accord or a Volvo S40? And if you are in for expensive cars, choose between S80 (Volvos Camry sized sedan) or a BMW 3 series or a Mercedes C class. Which one would you want?

This is clearly a problem for Volvo right now, hence the rebranding of its vehicles to make them more desirable and placing them in the premium car market. Lets hope Volvo succeeds as I would feel that it would be a loss to the industry if they were to lose their leader in vehicle safety innovations right?

Well, here is my honest confession... I stopped taking the production line cycle times for real from the 7th week onwards.... Why? Well my cousin Fred gave me an invaluable piece of advise... "Work smart boy... Give your boss what he wants lah... Learn to work like them la.... Just enjoy your Industrial Training while it lasts". That was indeed a great piece of advise as it gave me an idea. I should make good use of my strengths la! I can visualize and imagine pretty well when it comes to moving parts i think... And I have been observing the vehicle assembly process long enough to actually imagine them assembling the car in real time quite accurately. Combining these traits, I tried measuring the cycle time of the assembly by measuring the time to assemble the car in my imagination and then comparing the imaginary times to the actual measured time.

Those times came to within 10% error and from then on, my cycle time measurement became more of a stand there at the production line, observe carefully how the car is being assembled, go back to the CMM Machine room, sit down comfortably on the table behind, imagine the process and measuring the imaginary times. This method was far more efficient than actually measuring it for real and about 80% of the job was completed within these 3.5 weeks of "imaginary measuring". Dont blame me.... The actual process of cycle time measurement is to video record the operator at work without him knowing and then measuring the time by analyzing the worker's actions from the video. Since no camcorder was available to me, I made do with my eyes and memory and just stood there with out my stopwatch and clipboard, telling the operators that I am just looking... Not cycle time measuring... They were more than happy to see a trainee that seemingly want to learn about car assembly more than just wanting to finish his project and sometimes they even let me try it out by allowing me to assemble a few parts of the car.

So that was the wrap up of my industrial training... Besides learning about cars, I actually learned some KL roads and had quite a blast lepaking in KL larrr... Overall pretty good compared to other companies that pay twice as much as Volvo pays (RM 250/month) and I got to know about Volvos inside out!