This morning I had a rather unique (at least to me) experience. I got to get the feel of what it's like to work on a manufacturing fooor, while at the same time I was able to donate a few hours to Feed My Starving Childrenm (FMSC). Both were enlightening experiences.
FMSC packages a large amount of a special high-nutrition mixture of food specifically designed to bring severely malnourished young children back to health. It's vegetarian and contains natural grains (though not organic), in a balanced and high-calorie mixture that provides the right base to bring these kids back to health. I'm not enough of an expert in food science, but from what I know it seem like the process is sound and it feeds a lot of starving children very inexpensively.
Working on a project like this is very heartwarming. When I first woke up this morning, I was wondering why I had gotten myself into this. But then, an hour into it, I realized that it was a truly rewarding experience.
We ended up partitioning up jobs with Gwyn being part of a packaging station and I working in the warehouse area, providing the grain and the raw materials to the stations. It was fascinating to see how the process sorted itself out, as each person on the team tended to find the area they were best at. I found that I tended to work as a float-picking up the slack when one of the team members got behind, and as a runner-taking materials where they were needed. And as I did all of this, I got to see how each process worked: building cardboard shipping boxes, filling grain bins, taking grain bins out to the packaging stations, etc...
The number of manufacturing processes helped me get a real feeling for what manufacturing engineering is like. I found myself thinking in terms of process optimization, six-sigma and lean theory (lean takes on new meaning when we're talking about poverty and starvation), etc... It's tough being an engineer when doing things like this... :-)
I found that there were a number of ways that we could improve, plus ways that in a real manufacturing line, we could measure and optimize. If this were in the companies I have worked for over the last 30 years (mostly medical electronics), then these processes would all have had to be documented, validated, etc. Thus a whole group of engineers would be working them out, applying lean and six-sigma principles, etc. All of these to make the process go smoother.
For us, things seemed to fall into place. We were only there about three hours, but we managed to get enough food packaged and stacked on the shipping pallet to feed about 95 kids for a year. It was about $5000 worth of raw material, plus about 30 people * 3 hours each to package it. It felt great and, I realized, being a manufacturing runner is a lot of work. My heart really goes out to people on the production floor of any organization even remotely resembling what we did today.
So, at last I got to learn something about how another part of Corporate America works - the production floor and the warehouse - very different from the design and development engineering work I have done most of my career. It gave me a somewhat new perspective, and helped me understand how the various industrial models, such as Six-Sigma came into being. It also fed a lot of hungry little mouths. All in all, a rewarding and revealing morning's work...
