Aerobloggen

Hi Again

Time flies and I have just started my next period on my next department, namely fabrication. Here I have got involved with an exciting improvement project involving welding. The manufacturing methodology of fabrication allows us to utilize lighter materials and exploit more suppliers to reduce the cost of their products and manufacture lighter products with reduced environmental impact. Although the usage of fabrication provides several benefits to stay competitive, it comes at the expense of handling a manufacturing process with increased complexity in terms of more advanced fixtures and additional numerous degrees of freedom for their assembling, compared to our historical methods of large castings. This concludes that the welding is an important process to optimize and sustain a statistical process control over. Those of you who have read my personal presentation here at the blog might be familiar with some of my previous experience at GKN within this field, in terms of master thesis, summer employments etc. It thereby feels like a welcome return to be part of these improvement projects again and continue the work of which we strive to continuously maintain zero deviations on all of our products and processes. It is even more exciting to return after almost 1,5 year and witness the outcome of the previous work I have participated with in the past. I look forward with enthusiasm towards the upcoming two months and what conclusions and improvements we will be able to achieve.

In addition to my assignments at the fabrication, there is much happening with the young graduate project in the short term future. During January, we will travel and visit several of the ninth grade classes in Trollhättan and talk about engineering and other ways of working with technology. Among other things, we will elaborate upon what an engineer is, what they do on a daily basis and which different paths there is to become an engineer. We will also host an inspirational event on the evening of the 17^th January. Here, we will try to talk and inspire young adolescents more about studying at high school, college, university etc. But also how to think about future careers, tips on how to apply for summer employments etc. Are or someone you know studying in the 9^th grade and might be interested? In that case, I think you should sign up for our inspirational event at aerotrainees@gknaerospace.com. Register name and number of visitors, and don’t forget that the application deadline is the 10^th of January.

A fun last note, me and David recently had our first article published in the AES News, if you are interested to learn more about RRSP-contracts, I definitely think you should check it out!

/ Niclas

Hello Again

Time goes incredibly fast and it feels like you get to experience new things every day. In this way, supply chains and the role of SQA is very dynamic where every new day is different from the others. Now that the first internship is reaching is end, I thought that it would be a great opportunity to summarize some of the impressions of the initial time and my role as a future SQA. As previously mentioned, the role of SQA involves actively collaboration with suppliers and issues of quality, this leads to need of constantly keep up with the flow of information to constantly keep oneself updated. Practically this implies day to day work shaped by several emails, conference calls and other discussions. The funniest thing about this is that you get to meet a lot of different people, and especially people with deep expertise in certain areas, e.g. material or hot and cold structures. The opportunities to learn new things appears therefore to never be further than around the corner.

During the end of November and the beginning of December, I had the opportunity to travel on my first business trip abroad. It was a few days visit to United Kingdom to visit one of our suppliers. This was very interesting and educating, and we had good discussions e.g. quality and statistical process control. As you can interpret from the text above we also had several other discussions and a few visits to the manufacturing facility, but I also had a great opportunity to gain deeper insight to some of their data and measure some details in order to test an hypothesis we could decipher from previous data. This was truly educational and developing and I eagerly look forward to future company visits and business trips.

At the end of last week, it was time for the annual Christmas dinner, which the new graduate engineers host and organize in traditional Christmas spirit for old graduates and their partners. Due to my days out of office, I missed the careful preparations of the Christmas carols. I was instead in charge of the curtain, a crucial task for the audience to be able to take part of the show.

That was all for now, but keep following the blog, because soon there will be more post about the Euro trip conducted by the young graduates, and more information about some of the company visits we conducted.

Hello readers, my name is Neil and I am the third graduate engineer on the International Graduate Programmme (IGP), along with Malin and David. In this blog post I want to share my background, what I do here in Trollhättan, and my experience of living in Sweden!

A little background on how I got here: I am originally from London in the UK, and I completed a master’s degree in physics at the University of Southampton. After I graduated I moved to the Isle of Wight to work at GKN Cowes for a one-year internship. Here I worked at CTAL, a composites manufacturing partnership which was formed to create a carbon composite fan system for future Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, such as “Ultrafan”. My role in CTAL was in the Measurement and Inspection team, working on analysis and improvement of the measurement systems in the plant, as well as planning the inspection operations in the manufacturing sequence. I really enjoyed this role as I got to work directly with a lot of different people in CTAL, and I was lucky to be part of a great team.

I arrived in Sweden three weeks ago for my first 6 month IGP placement. I came here because I was keen to do my first placement as a technical placement within the space business unit of GKN, and it has also been a good opportunity for me to meet with some of the other GKN graduates and IGP engineers here in Trollhättan. My placement here is within the aerodynamics team, in the space rotors department. I am working with the Vinci project: an engine development program for ESA’s upcoming Ariane 6 launcher. My placement here involves improving some of our CAE tools for analysing space turbine design, as well as engine test analysis.

So far I have really enjoyed living in Sweden, so here are my top 10 Swedish highlights:

1. Playing Innebandy
2. Watching Frölunda v Skellefteå ice hockey in Gothenburg (next time I will learn the rules)
3. Friday Fika time
4. Swedish taco Friday – never saw this one coming
5. Afterworks
6. My first Swedish lesson
7. Pea Soup and pancakes
8. Walking around the locks and woods around Trollhättan
9. Strong Swedish coffee
10. Eating pepparkaka – I can’t stop!

And the lowlights:

1. The incredibly expensive beer!

I’m really looking forward to the rest of my time here in Sweden. I will write another blog article to let you know how it’s going – maybe my next blog article can be in Swedish!

Neil

Hello Again

As Emelie mentioned in the previous post, the young graduates participated in the regional finals of the First Lego League this weekend as the role of judges in different fields. This was a very rewarding opportunity for us, as it was incredibly fun and exciting to see how talented and skilled these young students were. The winner was the team Oh Deer, who had an innovative and exciting solution for today’s problems with wildlife accidents in the traffic.

 

Now that we have become more custom and familiar to our roles at our home departments, it’s time for the next category of activities for the young graduates, namely the internal meetings. Although we already soft started this activity by several introductions and meetings in our first weeks at the company, we will now start a coherent set of meetings internally within the organization. These meetings will consist of brief informal meetings with different persons and functions within the organization, and the purpose is to create a broad overview of the organization, as well as a valuable future network. This set of activities will run for the next 4 months,

This opportunity is very valuable to us, as it provides us with a unique chance to get familiar with the company and gain deeper insight on a holistic level regarding how the company operates and function. We will have the oppertuntity to meet with approxiametly 30-40 persons in the next 3-4 monts here at GKN Aerospace Sweden in Trollhättan. At the end of this set of meetings, we will hopefully have sufficient insights which we can use for two exciting meetings for the trip later in Februari when we will meet GKN plc CEO Nigel Stein and GKN Aerospace CEO Kevin Cummings to talk about the organization from a holistic perspective. To us young graduates, this seems like a great prevlige and the start of an invaluable educational journey.

Finally, I would also like to mention that we as graduate has started to identify the location of our next internships. As you probably already know, the graduate program is divided in 4 internships, divided by 10 weeks for each period. When choosing the internship locations, it feels like the possibilities are endless here at GKN because we design, manufactures and conducts research in most things related to the aerospace industry. For me personally, this was a very attractive attribute when applying for the young graduate program, since it provides unique opportunities to try different roles that otherwise would be difficult to come in contact with. So where will I be you might wonder? Well right now, I’m looking into spending a period closer to manufacturing in the role of a CME (Chief Manufacturing Engineer). I discovered this function after visiting a very exiciting course at Training Days, where presented some of their work which consisted of two of my biggest intrests, namely quality and technology. So right now we are planning and evaluating if there are any interesting projects and objectives I could participate within at that department. That’s all for now!

 

See you soon

Niclas Persson

Like the other trainees, I have just started my first internship at my home department, namely the Supply Chain. I work in a group called Supplier Quality Assurance, SQA. In brief, our work activities strive to handle suppliers and collaborate with them so that together we can achieve the right level of quality. For me personally, I have during my first two weeks instigated my work by diving into historical data with the aim of trying to analyze trends and synergies in the data in time series of a few years back. As an analytical person, and with a background in Lean Six Sigma, this has truly been a great way to get into the environment of Supply Chain and learn more about how we have reached the point where we are today. But this work is also support ourselves and our suppliers to raise our perspectives and be more long term in our way of working.

My biggest impression during these two weeks have primary been how amazing GKN and supply chain is as a workplace. As an SQA at GKN you operate to a large extent on a global market, with customers spread in many countries and continents. If you as a reader is an student and thinking about future professions, I really advise you to reflect on supply chain if you like to meet new people, want to work in a global market and enjoys to be in the middle of events.

The experienced blog readers may be aware that the young graduates every year conduct a side mission parallel with our trainee program. We have just been served the outline for this project, and I promise that it seems incredibly exciting! I eagerly look forward to get started on this project together with my colleagues, but right now i will not reveal anymore, but maybe by the missionwe will meet soon? Are you curious about what the mission is about, I advise you to continue to follow the blog for more information in the upcoming posts.

 

See you soon / Niclas Persson

Hi and welcome to a new year with the Aeroblog!

Since the start in 1986, we have now reached a year where the graduate program celebrates its thirtieth birthday. The familiar reader might also deduce that it is time to install a new group of Graduate Engineers for 2016/17. For this year, the program has undertaken a new development in extending the overall program length from twelve to sixteen months. And beyond the original five positions in the GKN Aerospace Sweden’s program, we this year have an additional contribution of two participant from GKN’s International Graduate Program (IGP). You can see us on the updated banner at the top of the page. If you wish to find out more about us, please click on the following link

After the first week’s introduction, we are now undergoing a two week internship in different manufacturing facilities. We are thereby striving to learn more about the products and processes that we manufacture and apply here in Trollhättan. More about these two weeks will be elaborated in the following posts.

Shortly, we will also be able to present our side mission of the year, a more thorough presentation about ourselves, and of course a great mixture of exciting people and experiences that we will cross path with on our journey.

Lastly, it is with a warm heart and deep respect we gratefully thank the Graduate Engineers of 2015/16, and we wish you the best of luck on your future carriers!

 

See you soon!

Young Graduates 2016/17