Aerobloggen

Hello again!

One of the projects that we graduates have been involved with in the last few weeks is to support young students with their homework, in collaboration with Intize. Intize is a nonprofit organization engaged in mentoring young students in mathematics. As a part of our year project to stimulate the interest of technology and science among young students, it feels like mathematics is a given cornerstone to encourage that interest. Are you interested in joining, or do you know anyone who might be? Then all you need is to show up, everyone is welcome.

But perhaps more interesting to many of you readers, as you know it will soon be time for the assessment days for the next set of graduates. I thereby thought I should spend most of this post to tell you more about what it means to be a graduate, what you can expect and what you can experience. Those of you who follow the blog perhaps know by now that the program is consistent with different 10 weeks rotations between different departments. As the graduate program currently is 30 years old within the company, there is a lot of internal experience to handle new graduates that enters different departments. And combined with the individual responsibilities and freedom for the graduate to influence the scheme to choose their next placements, the opportunities becomes limitless. Speaking of my own experience, I was with ease able to divide my current period into two five-week periods to broaden my knowledge and internal network as much as possible

But the company’s experience of operating the graduate program also shows when you see how open and interested various managers are to meet with the graduates over interviews where they can share their experience and stories. On that subject, we recently had our second meeting with Mike McCann (CEO GKN Aerospace Engine Systems) to learn more about his experiences and viewpoints on leadership, the business, the industry etc. Or to mention another example, it took us less than two days to book 4 senior managers within manufacturing to conduct interviews. This privilege that senior managers are open to share their time in order to share their experiences and lessons learned with us is incredibly valuable. And it feels like a shortcut to valuable information that otherwise would take tremendous amount of time to obtain.

Being a graduate also opens a lot of doors externally, which implies that we have not yet received a single no when we have contacted other companies and asked them to meet for a study visit or something similar. Many times, it feels like the opportunities to create ones external network is just as good as the possibilities to create ones internal network. And with the level of advanced technology that operates within out industry, you can imagine that there are numerous actors that operates all types of different technology, which creates opportunities to learn from each other that are virtually limitless.

To spice this up a little extra, the graduates also have a yearly project which I briefly mentioned at the beginning of the post, were we interact with at least to say unexpected tasks to solve as an engineer. We also undergo leadership training, experience visits from other graduates and schools, go on business trips and external educations and much much more. So to summarize this post, the greatest challenge as a graduate is to get time to suffice, because there is always new things to do and experience. It’s thereby lucky to have driven graduate colleagues who constantly collaborate to get the calendar to get together in order to take advantage of every opportunity given to us

 

See you later

After our amazing week in England, we have once again changed departments. I have been working at a quality department for almost a week now. This department supports the whole of GKN in Trollhättan within a number of different areas. One of these areas is making sure that all requirements from customers, standards and governments are met throughout our business. Another area is to develop and update the operation management system we use. The system describes all processes, standards and responsibilities.

However, during my ten weeks at the department I will mostly work with preemptive production development. This is done by monitoring the manufacturing processes in order to discover trends in the measured product characteristics to be able to solve problems before the product characteristics end up outside the tolerances. One tool that is used are control charts (se picture below).

The upper line illustrates the upper tolerance limit and the lower line illustrates the lower tolerance limit. Once a product has been processed in a machine, the characteristic that was processed is measured and the value is plotted in the control chart. Trends will gradually appear as more products are processed and measured. Is the trend showing that the characteristics are moving towards one of the tolerance limits? If so, the manufacturing process should be investigated to understand why this happens and to rectify the issue. The characteristic is continually measured and hopefully the measured values move towards the middle of the control charts, where they should be.

I find this area very exciting and interesting and I look forward to learn a lot more about it and how it can be used! As I mentioned previously I will mostly work with the production development but I will get the chance to understand what the department is doing in regards to the other areas as well. I am convinced that, no matter what work I will do in the future, I will always be able to benefit from what I am learning at this department!

After returning from England, I have just started on my new department, namely Materials Engineering. The main focus here has been to participate in the sub-division of metallurgy, but I have had excellent opportunities to interact with the other departments as well.

My level of pre-knowledge within material science could have been better, but it has been incredible interesting to enter as a novice and have the possibility to meet all the talented specialist, try advanced equipment’s and create my own understanding over some of the analysis we conduct in-house. For every day that passes, I begin to understand more and more how important material science is within our industry, our products and our processes. This insight feels like an important contribution to broaden my perspective from the previously focus on quality and continues improvement.

In my opinion, there are many benefits of doing the rotations in the graduate scheme but I would like to highlight two of them. Firstly, its supports you to create an invaluable internal network, where you can identify different specialist and unique skillsets within the organization, which create a feeling of comfort to approach any task or challenge since you know that expertize knowledge is just a phone call away.Secondly, it allows you to get enough insight in different areas and departments to be able to understand and appreciate the value that they are creating. This was one of the points that several leaders that we have meet have highlighted. To simplify, they advocate that a key to successful leadership is about being able to understand and appreciate the value that different individuals and departments create, and how this value creation interact cross-functionally and which synergies it can create.

Lastly, don’t forget to go in and check out the presentations of the young graduates, where we recently got an additional presentation from out American colleague Nicholas Ninivaggi. You can find the presentation on the following link

Dear blog guests,

In Neil’s latest post you read about two of our visits at GKN sites in England last week. Before these visits though, the first day in Her Royal Highness the Queen’s United Kingdom offered a number of interesting meetings with people from diverse parts of GKN plc. All of these taking place at our elegant office at Pall Mall in central London.

First out in the series of captivating meetings was the one with our fellow graduates at AES North America, Josh Bruggeman, Michael Rorapaugh, Nick Ninvaggi and their program administrator Megan Morgan. We met for just over an hour of meet-and-greet where we finally got to see the colleagues who we up to that point only knew by e-mail. We exchanged experiences from our respective cultures, graduate schemes, and GKN sites while also planning for the upcoming week together. It was truly interesting to get an insight to the daily life at the other side of the Atlantic, and it was a great start of a very enjoyable week together. If you continue to read our blog, you will for sure hear more from our newfound American friends when they all three have moved to Sweden in September for their half year long abroad placement at our site here in Trollhättan.

After a tasty lunch, it was time for a meeting with one of the heavyweights of GKN plc., namely Kevin Cummings CEO – GKN Aerospace. To be given the opportunity to meet the Chief Executive of our division for one and a half hour of exclusive contact was an honor and a privilege given to very few employees in our organization. Kevin immediately made an impression on us as he, even though he only had known about our visit since a few hours, was very well-prepared with recorded notes for answers on our long list of sent in questions. Kevin spoke about big topics such as experiences gained as a CEO within a larger corporate group which simultaneously deals with underlying subdivisions and major strategies within our division, as well as personal subjects such as day-to-day assignments and key events and characteristics which has lead him up to the position he holds today. All in all, the meeting was a welcoming dialogue and we are warmly grateful that Kevin gave his valuable time to inspire us who represent the company’s future.

When the meeting with Kevin Cummings had come to an end, we raised your sights even higher and met with Nigel Stein CEO – GKN plc. Nigel fulfilled all our expectations put on a successful British businessman and he possessed both great courtesy and a convincing composure. Nigel has been the CEO for the GKN corporate group since 2012, and he has since then led us on a journey towards greater focus on and growth within the Aerospace and Driveline divisions. This is a great success story, which he promises will continue for years onward. A hearty part of the meeting was when Michael Turner, Chairman of the GKN Board and moreover a huge Manchester United fan, entered the room and interrupted Nigel’s narrations simply because he wanted to thank us Swedes for Zlatan Ibrahimović, who had secured the victory for United in the English Football League Cup the previous day. After this laidback entry, Michael was (just as Kevin and Nigel) very curious to hear more about us graduates, our backgrounds and our future expectations. It was especially encouraging to see that the leaders all put great interest in our views on GKN and potential development areas. We truly felt that we were given a unique chance to influence the company on the highest possible level. Nigel and Michael also explained the company’s ambitious growth strategies and provided us the impression that possible future acquirements would quite probably be made. In summary, the overlying message was that GKN plc. has a continued bright future ahead, which was further underlined when our stock price raised almost 5 % on the day after when the annual statement was released. The day at Pall Mall was undeniably fruitful for everyone involved!

Hello readers

Last week I was part of a study visit week to the U.K. with the AES and some of the IGP graduate trainees. The progress that has been made in lean techniques and automation in some of the sites that we visited was very impressive, and this post will be about this subject. Two sites which impressed me in this way were Luton (Aerospace, Special Products Group), and Erdington, Birmingham (Driveline).

Our colleagues in Luton manufacture cockpit windows, canopies, and de-icing systems. Of particular interest here was the takt time oriented production line. Takt time is the time between the start of production of consecutive units, when the production rate is set to match customer demand. One of the transparencies manufacturing lines was set up as a sequence of workbenches, with the duration at each station set relative to the takt time. The operators were cross trained to operate multiple stations so that there were no single point failures in the line (e.g. if operators are off sick). The visual display area next to the line had a set of vertical plastic tubes below a heading for each product. Coloured plastic balls were used to fill up these tubes on a daily basis with the status of production; red balls were used for scrapped parts, green for completed units, and other colours to denote rework etc. The number of deliveries per day required by the customer were written next to each tube. This visual display system enables the whole manufacturing community to instantly spot quality or delivery issues. Furthermore the takt line itself allows great visualization of the production value stream. Bottlenecks and stations which suffer frequent breakdowns or quality issues become immediately apparent. The eye-catching visual display system and the structure of the line improve productivity and team spirit in the operators.

The second site that captured our interest was the Driveline site in Erdington, Birmingham. Here they manufacture driveshafts, propshafts, and associated components, and assemble them to ship to large customers as diverse as JLR, Bentley and Nissan. The difference in production rates between Erdington and Trollhättan is staggering. Our weekly part production rates vary from several units to far less than one per week. The production rates in Erdington range from hundreds of units to several thousand units a week.

To facilitate flow through such a site, they have made great progress in automation. Examples of the automation employed here are robotic arms to move parts between operations, and in and out of processing operations. Other examples were highly advanced machines both in terms of speed and size. It varied between machines that could perform operations in cycle times of a few seconds, to some of the largest automatic painting machines in the entire country.

All of these systems have decreased cycle times, reduced costs, and improved quality compared to the manual alternatives.

In terms of lean implementation, there are large PVD areas with clear metrics focusing on efficiency, quality and delivery. Practical problem solving and continuous improvement activities are applied on the shop floor, with great buy in at all levels of the organization. Andon screens display delivery progress and quality issues clearly throughput the plant. The shop floor is organized for efficient throughput of the flow units. The key to the creation of this system was twofold. First, true buy-in from senior management. Second, a dedicated time slot set aside for every single worker in the plant every week to focus on CI/lean activities. I think this time dedication to improvement, is what has really facilitated the success of the facility. We were extremely impressed with the level of automation and lean implementation we saw in these sites. Although not everything we saw is applicable to us in AES, I’m sure we can learn a lot from our colleagues in SPG and driveline.

See you soon!

/Neil

As Niclas wrote, we had the honor of experiencing some exciting and instructive days in Linköping last week. It was especially rewarding and interesting to meet some of SAAB’s young graduates. After an informative and interesting day at SAAB we had the chance to test out their advanced JAS-simulator, and apart from causing nausea and dizziness to most of the graduates, it was a pleasant experience. By the way, a bird whispered that Niclas forgot to pull up the landing gear when performing an emergency landing on the road E4 outside Linköping, but it’s probably just rumors. Now, our second rotations is turning to an end, therefore, I take this opportunity to comment on my time here at the R&T (Research & Technology) department. However, this time I was more assigned a project rather than a specific department, which of course, has been very exciting. I have no previous project management experience whatsoever, and therefore my time here has been very rewarding in terms of experience. The project I lead extends over a few years and I will therefore keep some focus on that particular project during the continuation of the graduate program. Project management is extremely fun and I can see myself working as a project manager in the future. I also want to praise my colleagues at PTC (”Production-Technology Center” a part of the R&T department) as incredibly nice and competent, and I will miss the wonderful atmosphere there.

Activity week 3 is soon upon us, and I will now hint a little about what we are embarking and which sites we will visit. Joining us for this trip will also our American graduate colleagues, and the goal is to establish a close and personal contact with them. The underlying aim of the study visits are to connect with people on site, increase the overall picture of what GKN do and how we operate globally, and at the same time, act as ambassadors for GAS. Described below are some of the sites that we will visit, all of them in England this time.

GKN Aerospace Luton is a world leader of electro-thermal ice protection system for military and civilian application. The goal is to learn more about this product portfolio from design to application.

GKN Western Approach manufacture wing structures in composite materials and there we will get an insight into the latest composite technology for aircraft structures from design to production.

GKN Aerospace Filton is the “center of excellence” for EBW (Electron Beam Welding). The main focus of this study visit will be to find out as much as possible about this additive manufacturing-technology, as well as to get an insight into the preparations for a large-scale industrialization of additive manufacturing.

GKN Driveline Birmingham is a part of GKN plc, unlike GKN Aerospace that focuses on technologies that operates in and above the atmosphere, GKN Driveline focuses on the manufacturing and developing of technologies that move on the ground, i.e. cars. Surely, it will be interesting to find out how GKN Driveline differ from us in strategic and operational management.

Hi again

Hopefully no one has missed that the application for the next years graduate program still is open, until the 28th of Febraury. An exciting addition for this year is that we are looking for an individual with a masters degree in business administration, economics or equivalent.

You can find the ad by following this link

To program is designed in the exact same way as the regular graduate program, which implies that you will be a member of the graduate group, participate in the same trainings, internships and a 6 month period abroad. The only difference is that your future role will be within business administration and business control.

If this sounds interesting and you´re eager to know more, then I recommend that you read some of the post from former graduate Gustav Söderberg, who made this journey last year.

Hi again

As mentioned by Emelie in the previous post, the graduates just had a few eventful days in Linköping. This was three very exciting and educative days with several highlights. For me personally, I really appreciated the discussions with Saab regarding their long term negotiations and agreements with their customers. In addition, we also meet some very talented students at the career fair Larm, who showed genuine interest in GKN Aerospace and GKN Driveline. One of the last highlights was the visit at the Swedish military base for helicopters, were we got to see some of the helicopters, but most interesting got a thorough review of the engine to an Black Hawk helicopter.

Time is starting to reach its end at my second department, fabrication. The most developing has been a project I’ve been driving to enhance the way we work with process control and quality improvements of our processes. Simplified, this project has consisted of different adjustments in our way of working to visualize data to highlight the variation in our processes in order to illuminate the causing root causes. This simplifies the work for us to identify and eliminate variation on our processes, resulting in predictable robust processes. A fun observation I have made after working with this is that those lessons I gained through the acquisition of a Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma is just as useful and applicable if you work in Supply chain with suppliers, or in production with wide improvement projects. The beauty of this is in my opinion that one doesn’t need to be a detailed expert in a specific area to be able to work with improvements, the key to success is rather to follow certain universal methodologies to systematically break down and visualize the problem in a way that allows the problem to be less intangible.

To finalize this post, I give you a few examples of some of the things that will happen in the upcoming weeks, perhaps fun for you readers who right now consider to apply for the graduate program, whose application is open until February 28. Today, me and Emelie will conduct a lecture for all thesis workers within the company about how it is to be a graduate, followed by a dinner later in the evening. There will also be a longer meeting with CEO Mike McCann and the graduates. Next week will be the last at my current department, so I will try to close all lose ends and start to hand over tasks and projects to my colleagues. This is followed by the England trip with exciting company visits, as well as the first meeting with our American graduate colleagues. After returning from England, the Swedish graduates will have a two-day leadership training before I start my new period of Materials Lab. That week ends with a school visit here at the company when Lyrfågel-school’s 6th grade will visit.

See you soon!

 

How do you know what you want to work with? Which way should you choose? If you have chosen a path, it is too late to repent? These were just some of the many exciting and difficult issues we trainees lectured about during the inspirational evening. At the event, food and drinks were on GKN’s treat and the participants got the chance to talk to some of GKN’s many engineers, operators and ITU-students.
The evening was organized for all ninth graders who are now faced with the choice of choosing high school, and was one of our many tasks within the framework of our trainee assignments “Raise Awareness of Engineering to Adolescences” (RAEA).
The inspirational evening was meant to serve as a source of inspiration and information. We wanted to mediate how one could start a career in an easy and understandable way. At the same time, we wanted to take the opportunity to give some well-weighted advice. Advice that can make the road to a dream job a little bit easier and more fun. To conclude the evening we here present a summary of the lecture targeting ninth graders and their parents.

Why an education?
First of all, an education gives you knowledge and knowledge is all about applying and understand information. Secondly, an education gives you the tools necessary to critically examine and absorb information, tools that are becoming increasingly important in a world where misinformation has become everyday food. Knowledge also makes you sought and more independent, both of which are prerequisites for a greater freedom.

Freedom do not just mean having a lot of options to choose from, it also means having the option to choose or not to choose between available options depending on one’s wants or needs, and an education gives you just that. It gives you professional freedom, i.e. it makes it easier for you to change job or industry, or, for example, to choose where and what to work with. The professional freedom also affects your financial and private freedom, and together they constitute the three degrees of freedom that are the very foundation for a more varied, exciting and enjoyable life.
An education also gives you the chance to meet fun and interesting people, people who might become your friends for life, and who knows, someone might offer you a way to your dream job?

How do you know what you want to work with?
Finding an answer to that question can be very difficult. Maybe you will never really know what you really want to work with. However, an interest can be born and grown over time, therefore, you should not be afraid to try new things and new ways. It is also true that the better you become of something the more fun it becomes. To master a profession or a school subject is no different from mastering for example an instrument or a sport, it requires a great deal of time, patience and perseverance. So maybe you will find an interest where you now experience boredom, so take the chance, try to struggle, be persevere and give it a fair chance!

Aiming for very high goals can sometimes be difficult as it becomes hard to see which optimal way to choose right now. So a tip could be to set targets, it makes the trip a little easier. Since almost all employers today require their employees to have a high school education, which is also a necessity for studies at colleges and universities, a high school diploma is a good first milestone on your way to an exciting future with many exciting options.

If you really do not know what you want then?
Well, then you may want to choose an education that is as broad as possible, for example, an education that is both practical and theoretical. This increases the chance that you will find something you are really interested in. A good option can be the ITU program at GKN Aerospace which is conducted in collaboration with the Nils Ericson High School. The program is both work preparatory and simultaneously gives you the competence and access needed for higher studies. In other words, the ITU-program gives students a unique chance to create their own future.

With that said, we trainees want to express sincere thanks to all of those who attended the inspiration evening. For more information and inspiration please go to https://www.gymnasium.se/yrkesguiden/.

There are not that many days left of our second rotation. We will start at our new departments at the beginning of March but we have loads of fun stuff to do until then. On Monday we are going up to Linköping to make a visit at Saab. It will be very interesting as I do not have much knowledge of their work there. I actually did my master’s thesis at Saab, but in Gothenburg, and in a completely different division. I am sure we will be well taken care of by their graduate engineers and hopefully learn lots of new things.

We will stay the night in Linköping because on Tuesday LARM is taking place, which is Linköping’s Techology Students Career Fair. We will be representing GKN at the fair and I know it will be much fun. Especially for Andreas who studied there. Of course, we hope that many of you readers will come talk to us, maybe we will recruit new blog readers but most of all we hope that many of you guys will be introduced to GKN and tempted to apply for a job here (as a graduate engineer, thesis worker or something else)!

Linköping will be honored by our presence for one more night as we are making a study visit to the helicopter fleet in Linköping on Wednesday! I am not sure what we are doing there (as I haven’t been in charge of arranging this visit), so I will not say anything about that. However, I am sure it will be highly informative and fun!

When we get back from Linköping we have a few days to breathe and relax (and work of course) before leaving for England and our great adventure. The trip will be amazing in every way, I am sure, and you will read several posts about this later so I will not tell you anything further right now.

Once we are back from England we will have our final days of group dynamics and self-development. This will be the last thing we do before the work at our new departments starts. I will do my third rotation at a quality department and I hope that I get to try a bit of everything but that I also get to work with long-term development of the production. Once the work is started I will definitely tell you more about what the department (and I) are doing!

Until then – keep reading the blog and come visit us at LARM!