Aerobloggen

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