Aerobloggen

Hello everyone!

With the spread of Covid-19 in Västra Götaland steadily increasing for the past few weeks, most of us at GAS have gone back to working from home after the Christmas break. Some people enjoy it, while others do not. It is easy to end up in a negative spiral when you have your office, gym and home behind the same door, and you easily forget the meaning of the word routine. With that said, we hope that we can be back in the office again soon and we have a very exciting spring (March) ahead of us, which makes it easier to keep our spirits up.

My second rotation, which started around Christmas, is in the Lean department. Elias told you briefly about the department in his previous blogpost, which was the department for his first rotation. However, the focus of our rotations have been very different. In my master’s, Quality and Operations Management, we had a course in Six Sigma that certified me as a Six Sigma Black Belt. Without going into too much detail, Six Sigma is about implementing improvement projects using different tools and there are different certification levels (White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt). According to the global Lean Academy at GKNA, they now want to increase the proportion of certified Green Belts and Black Belts to improve GKNA’s way of working with systematic problem solving. My role in the department is to assist my supervisor in her project to become a certified Black Belt and thus Trollhättan’s Site Black Belt Representative, and to coach ongoing Green Belt projects. I will also have the opportunity to participate as a co-facilitator during the Lean Foundation trainings when the restrictions ease again, a training that will be held for all employees to increase their knowledge about Lean.

Take care.

/Moa

Hey!

After a much needed Christmas holiday, we are now well rested and excited for 2022, the year when everything hopefully changes for the better and we will not have to hear phrases such as “due to the current circumstances” and “new restrictions”.

Even though we officially started our second rotation a few weeks before Christmas, it has now finally started to gain some real momentum when everyone is returning from their holiday. My new department is rather diverse, and they work with everything from identifying new technologies to managing the company’s patents and mapping the effects our products have on the environment. My supervisor works a lot with the latter, and my assignment during the upcoming months consists of two parts. The first part is to create a life cycle assessment on one of our products. A life cycle assessment, or LCA, means that you investigate the life of a product, from raw material to recycling, which you can see in the picture below. This is something we want to create for all of our products here at GKN Aerospace in order to gain more knowledge and awareness about what effects our products have on the environment. I will model this LCA in a software called GaBi, so during these first few weeks of the rotation I have completed a tutorial to try to learn the program since it is completely new to me.

The second part of my assignment is to update a sustainability tool that is used at GKN Aerospace when designing and developing new products and technologies to make sure that the sustainability perspective is not forgotten. The aspect of the tool I am working with deals with materials and material choices. This is very important because we want to avoid materials that, for example, are conflict minerals or that will be difficult to have access to in the future, something this tool is trying to visualize. For this assignment, I have had to upgrade my Excel skills, and I have also tried some VBA (programming in Excel), which has been a lot of fun!

May 2022 be a great year!

/Emelie