Aerobloggen

It’s with mixed feelings I look out the window and see that it snows horizontally in Trollhättan right now, at least it’s not pitch black when you leave the office anymore… The past month rushed by with development week, recruitment of 2022 graduates and last week I had the opportunity to tag along my new department for a week of meetings at two of our US sites.

At the moment, I’m doing my third rotating at Supply Chain Engines, a global department who supports all Engines-sites across the globe, where I will work on further developing internal communications and knowledge sharing. As part of this project, I was invited to join the department for a gathering at our site in Newington to discuss Supply Chain and Procurement for three days.

The journey started in a turboprop plane to Copenhagen before boarding the A350-900 to Newark Liberty International Airport. The latter is propelled by the two Trent XWB engines where we manufacture the Intermediate Compressor Case at our site in Trollhättan.

Once in place, the meetings were held in Newington at our Engines site that manufactures large Fan cases to GE90 and IMC to the smaller of the GTF engines, 24k. The frist day we talked about the expectations of the team, targets and inventory management. One of the lesser expected learnings were that Americans serve their coffee in boxes and if you expect seven Swedes to be present, one of those boxes will not be enough to get through the day.

During day two, we talked about engagement, communications and knowledge sharing. Together with my current manager I conducted a workshop regarding how the department wants to communicate, what meetings that should be held continuously and how they can be more effective.

Last day was spent talking about new Aerospace standards and how they affect and ease our daily work before the afternoon was free to meet each other and discuss common issues before going home.

Before going home on Friday we visited our site in Manchester. It was great to see their workshop since it differs quite a lot from what we do in Trollhättan. In Manchester, they focus on manufacturing blades for the engines fan and compressor. For some programs, the process is quite similar to how we work in Trollhättan, a large forging that looks similar to the end product which is then processed to finished goods. However, they also produce really small compressor blades that is no more than 15cm long and is milled out of a block of aluminum. If you weren’t aware of the end product, you would have no clue what the raw material was supposed to become.

After the tour we headed back to Newark for the plane back home and the weekend. A short but intense trip to the US.

Interested in Aerospace? Right now we have a lot of interesting jobs on the GKN Aerospace career page, go have a look!

/Alex

Hi, I’m back!

This week I’m extra thankful for being back in more southern parts of Sweden. Friends in Luleå reported the first 4 decimeters (you’ll have to translate it yourself) of slushy snow while I was enjoying my morning coffee in the sun.

After on-boarding, workshop practice and teambuilding we have soon completed the third week in what will be the greater part of our traineeprogram, our rotations on-site in Trollhättan. The first 10 weeks everyone will be spending at their home department before exploring new departments based on personal interest and opportunities. My home department is at Strategy & Business Innovation which is a part of Business Line Engines meaning that we work globally to support all of our 14 Engine sites even though the team currently is based in Trollhättan. My first rotation consists of two parts. One of them is working on the yearly plan for Engines and the activities the company must perform to meet the requirements towards owners, government, customers and employees. The other one is working with the digitalization team towards a conceptual factory of tomorrow and a cost estimation based on the function we forecast will be crucial.

First few weeks has been a lot about meeting people in different departments of the company, gaining an understanding of the strategy work and abbreviations everywhere. The welcoming has been great and it’s amazing that every person we meet takes time to talk about their role and surprisingly often they have a connection to the trainee program. Additionally, Robin (2020-trainee) have tricked Elias and myself to start playing padel tennis, we’ll see how long my knees will withhold.

The first rotation has barely started but it’s about time to start thinking about what department we would like to spend our next rotation on. But we will have to talk more about that in another post.

Are you interested in the Traineeprogram or just curious about what we’re doing in Trollhättan? Come by our digital showcase at Armada and we’ll take it from there!

Take care!

/Alex