May month, summer is here and it has now been 8 months since we started our trainee program. Time flies! I am now on my third trainee rotation, which unfortunately is coming to an end.
After trying out purchasing, logistics development and seeing some of our production, I was curious about how we think about our future business, so for me it was natural to do this rotation within Business Development. During the past weeks I have been focusing on the Asian market, where a lot of work is done concentrated on business intelligence, creating relations and negotiating various types of agreements. This is done with aim on countries such as India, China, Japan, Korea, etc. During my trainee rotation, I have been involved in working on an exciting business opportunity for GKN, which has been really fun. I have learned a lot about export control, that is, what is legal to deliver or manufacture in which places of the world. I have also worked with our technology department which has been fun to get a more technical approach to the business opportunity. As you may understand, future business opportunities include sensitive information and are therefore secret for now. I cannot go into detail, but if this deal is sealed, I promise you will hear about it.
Now, we are all preparing for our next activity week which starts on Sunday. Italy is the destination and we have many exciting company visits planned. Hopefully we will have good weather and be able to have one or two gelatos between the visits, yummy!
It’s been a while since last time, so I was thinking that I would give you a small update of what has happened since then.
I have completed my projects during my first rotation at purchasing and now started at my new department, which is none less than Logistics Development! Here I have Martin as a manager, who actually is a former trainee. He knows everything about GKN and is a master of both excel and simulation tools, so I learn a lot only by being here. At logistics development I am currently working with two different projects:
For my first project, I will draft a layout for a department at the company to simplify packaging management. I will also review the fixture storage and see how we can streamline all this to make it easier for operators.
In my second project, we aim to optimize our industrial structure throughout our site in Trollhättan. I therefore work a lot with flow and coating data, trying to connect this to quality data, and identify any bottlenecks in production. It is similar to some kind of data mining, which I have never worked with = super exciting!
In addition to our rotations, we also have a little extra responsibility for all new thesis workers who come to GKN. Yes, you heard right, you can do your master’s thesis at GKN! In fact, many employees at GKN have actually started their career here as thesis workers and then continued as either trainees or took a permanent position. So if you have not finished your studies yet and are looking for a thesis placement, GKN is an excellent option.
Right now we have a total of 25 thesis workers here who write their theses in different areas. Quality development, AM, industry 4.0 and welding operations are just a few examples of all the exciting focus areas you can dig into. Many of the students who come to GKN for their master’s thesis do not have any connection to Trollhättan but have a burning interest for the aerospace industry. Many therefore travel all across the country to do their theses at GKN. Some come two and two while others come completely alone, and it is our mission to make them feel welcome here. We do this by arranging a thesis lunch every other week and also organizing other activities outside of work every now and then. Many of the thesis workers started last week or the week before that, so we took the opportunity to organize an AW this Tuesday. We met at a tapas restaurant in Trollhättan where we ate lots of good food and got to know each other. We were over 20 people who stayed until late at night. A well-organized event can be said, and more will come!
I have just returned to the office after Christmas, which I spent in my dear Norrland together with family and friends. Especially the snow was something I had longed for, since Trollhättan is a bit short of that product. Now I am at home, rested and excited for a new trainee rotation! Before I get started though, I will update you about our last activity week, and more particularly, the visit to Safran.
Visit to Safran
This was our last study visit for the week. The previous study visits during the week had been good, but the visit to Safran still met my expectations with a great deal! We had a packed day with schedule from 9-16 plus transportation around. We visited Safran’s site in Villeroche, which was amazing. Villeroche is quite close to Paris and by car it takes no more than about an hour. We like to think that our site in Trollhättan is quite large with our more than 2,000 employees and 3 major workshops, but it was nothing compared to Safran. Safran had about 5000 employees working on everything from the assembly of jet engines to customer relations with among others, Airbus.
As if that was not enough, Safran also had a large museum where the day’s tour started. The museum was run by retired employees from Safran who worked as volunteers with renovating engines and taking care of guided tours. We also happened to be lucky that the one who guided us was none other than the former CEO of the CFM56 engine, who had many exciting stories to tell about both his own career and the aerospace industry overall.
As mentioned before, the museum was very large and featured elements from the history of the entire aerospace industry, since Wright brothers flew their aircraft in 1903, to 2000 where Safran is working with their successful LEAP and CFM56 engines.
Safran’s Museum
After the museum visit, we met one of Safran’s commercial managers who had a full overview of Safran’s final assembly line, which we soon would get the opportunity to see in real life. He explained how they work with AR (Augmented reality) and effective assembly lines to cope with future production and high demands from customers. After the presentation and chat, we finally got to see the final assembly line where the big engines were assembled. There were different assembly processes for different engines which was exciting to see. What I was most impressed with was that it was so quiet, efficient and modern. I had expected a lot of noise and a bit of outdated industrial facilities, but Safran was quite the opposite, which was fun to see!
The whole group in front of a LEAP engine, excited to see Safran’s final assembly line
In the evening we all went out for a nice dinner together at Notre Dame. We tried escargots, foie gras and other French specialties which was delicious. After that, we went to the Eiffel Tower to do some nightly sightseeing. During the activity weeks, we work and learn more about the aerospace industry, so if you want to do some sightseeing in the cities you travel to, you sometimes get to do it at odd times. We entered the Eiffel Tower exactly two minutes before they closed the entrance and saw the whole tower lit in the dark night. It was a nice end to the day and our second activity week!
Christmas is approaching, which also means that the time at our home departments starts to come to an end. Since this is the last week of our rotation, we have all got quite a lot to complete before we leave. In one way, it is nice to be able to finalize and tick off different projects but in other ways it is a bit sad to leave the department and all the colleagues I have come to know. “Time flies”, is a common saying, and so it has really been. Fortunately, this is not a “goodbye”, but rather an “until next time”, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we are very excited for our next trainee rotations.
Before we start our next rotations, it is time for our second activity week which we have planned for the last couple of weeks. For our previous activity week, as you loyal readers surely remember, we went to Stockholm where we among other things got to visit OHB and SSC, two exciting space companies. For this activity week we have chosen to put the bar higher and push our budget to max. We will therefore go on a road trip in Europe, including Amsterdam and Paris as stops, which will be really exciting. Exciting partly because of the companies we will visit and partly because we will spend time with each other 24/7 for over a week, which can be intensive. But hopefully everything will be fine and make us an even tighter group!
On Friday morning we will begin our journey and for the coming week we will visit ESA, Fokker, Safran and GKN Driveline. It will be a hectic schedule, but we will surely learn a lot. I am especially interested in visiting Safran and to meet my contact person there, sine I am the one who have been responsible for organizing this particular visit. Of course I am also looking forward to visiting two beautiful European capitals: Amsterdam and Paris, and hope that we will have time for some sightseeing between business visits. I think that it is fun with other languages so I have already begun to repeat useful French phrases, hoping to be able to show off with them during the trip. You will hear more about our activity week next week when Maria and Alexander are going to update you about our lives as aerotrainees, so keep an eye out
Last Saturday, the majority of this year’s trainees volunteered as judges at First Lego League in Trollhättan where GKN was the main sponsor. This was done as a part of the trainee project with the goal of inspiring youths to choose technology. The idea of having to work on a Saturday might not be appealing to everyone, but in this case it was actually great fun!
First Lego League is a competition for elementary school classes where they design and program a lego robot, this is done either in the students’ own spare time or connected to the school’s technical education. They then compete by performing various assignments on a course and aim to get as many points as possible. The teams also conduct a project in connection with this where they come up with solutions to various current issues. For this year, the theme was “Hydro dynamics”, where the students were supposed to come up with solutions to water-related problems, for example today’s high water consumption in the western world or water shortage in developing countries. For example, suggestions were made for applications that log water usage or a water mixer that separates clean drinking water and dirty shower water and then use it for different purposes as a solution to the problems.
At the competition we were assigned different judge roles, ranging from robot judges to core value judges. I myself was a technology judge and got to judge the design and construction of the lego robots as well as the programming. A total of 15 teams participated in the competition, but as always, there could only be one winner: Team Dalenium, who received the honor, a lego trophy and 30,000 in travel allowances to participate in the Scandinavian competition in Oslo. Not bad for a high school class. All teams were extremely talented and had really thought through their projects and design of robots. It was fun to see the drive of the participants and I really think that an event like this is important to increase the technology interests among today’s youths.
Winning team “Team Dalenium” receiving their price
At my home department, purchasing, all is going fine. I have control over my projects and I get to meet many new people at the company. Because the rotations of the trainee program are so short, it is not possible to get any responsibility for, for example, a supplier where it is important to have long term relationships. Instead, I am working on projects connected to purchasing, meaning that I get the opportunity to walk around the company and talk with people from the entire organization.
Since last time, Dropship Project has been put on hold since we realized that it partially coincided with Project Balken. In Project Balken we investigate the handling of spares to see if it could be done more efficiently anywhere else than in production. In this project, I have so far met operators in the various workshops as well as material managers and DQR to get an overview of the current situation. The next step is to consider how the control of this might look in the future and then evaluate whether this is possible to implement or not.
I have also recently started a new project that we can call Project Conflict Minerals. A background for this project is that warring groups in the Congo region break and sell minerals to finance their operations, such minerals include: gold, tin, tantalum and tungsten (3T+G). To solve this problem, we try to overcome the demand of minerals suppliers who support warring groups, so it is important to know about how our suppliers work with these minerals.
The idea of my trainee position is that I have purchasing as my home department and that I most likely will get a permanent employment here after the trainee program. Since I do not work so much with my colleagues at my own department, I was a little curious about what one actually does in the daily work of the buyer. I have now been awarded a “fadder” at the purchasing department, namely Elin Elmdahl, a former trainee and now buyer of castings that I get shadow and help alongside my own projects. Elin invites me to supplier meetings and teaches me about the different computer programs you work in as a buyer, which is not the easiest at the beginning, but it’s fun and the days are going fast! Here’s a short interview with Elin:
Name: Elin Elmdahl Years at GKN: 11 years (Thesis 2006, trainee 2007) Position: Buyer Castings
Describe GKN in three words: Multinational Aerospace company
What work do you do at the purchasing department? You have the main commercial responsibility for the suppliers, evaluate new suppliers, purchase materials, negotiate contracts and handling conflicts that occur during current contracts.
What is the best parts of your job? It is a dynamic environment with many contact areas. External contacts and travel from time to time to suppliers provide extra spice in the everyday life.
What’s the worst parts of of your job? It includes some administrative work e.g. to review blocked invoices due to an imbalance in the purchase order between goods receipt and received invoices.
Why should one become a buyer? As a buyer you have a great opportunity to influence and improve cooperation with GKN’s supplier base. GKN is not better than its “Supply Chain”. Unless they deliver on time, the right quality and the right price, GKN will not succeed.
Do you have any other wisdom words you want to send to our readers? There are many old dragons on GKN. Do not be afraid to ask them for advice. They gladly share their wisdom.
My name is Emma Winblad von Walter and just like two of my trainee colleagues, I have my educational background from LTU (If you want to read more about us, check out our personal presentations HERE). I have studied M.Sc. Industrial and management engineering where I have been taught to view problems from a wider perspective and having a holistic view, this is probably the reason why a young graduate program felt appealing to me in the first place.
I had no relation at all to GKN or the aerospace industry before I started working here, so it is mainly my interest and passion for technology that led me to this position. During my first weeks, I have had a lot of new impressions, especially since my knowledge about the technical parts is limited. But at the same time I am learning a lot and having great fun while doing it!
I am selected for the local trainee program at GKN with Purchasing as my home department. Each one of us trainees are employed under different home departments, where we also have our home department manager. This is my second week at purchasing and so far I have gotten a good impression! I am now mainly working with two different projects, both of which are linked to the handling of spare parts at the company, we can call them: • Project Dropship • Project Balken
For my first project, I am investigating the possibility of taking spare parts from supplier to company and then to customer instead of sending them directly from supplier to customer (so-called dropship). In my second project, I am investigating so-called “unclean spare parts” (spare parts used partly in production and partly as pure spare parts) to see if the current logistics solution can be optimized. I will tell you more about this in my next blog post.
I will be at my home department now for 10 weeks, after that we will have an activity week and then start a second trainee rotation, and so on. The other rotations are done in consultation with the home department manager who can recommend people to talk to or which areas are beneficial for a future role at the home department, which, in my case, is as a buyer.
After a bit of struggling, we are now up and running with the blog. We are aiming to upload posts approximately twice a week in order for you to get to know us as trainees and hear what we actually do at GKN, so keep your eyes open!
