I'm happy to give you insights about my production internship. Now, you may be asking yourself, what is this production internship he is talking about? While each trainee has four project rotations in different locations, we actually also have to complete a production internship. This internship is a 3-week learning experience where ZF trainees gain insight on how production plants operate and see the daily production routine. And how are we doing this? Well, we are working first hand on the assembly line and with the production workers themselves. For me, this is taking place at Guadalajara's dampers plant: El Salto, in the Process Group 7.
The Process Group 7 produces the active dampers CDCs, a new damper in the site. Unfortunately or fortunately - it depends of the point of view - the moment I arrived, the line was on fire: several orders were in delay and a lot of batches of boxes full of dampers needed to be shipped yesterday.
Indeed, I have learned a lot: about how not to do the planning, what can be done in stress situations to solve problematics, how to proceed with other departments and different parts of the process line. It's been chaotic to be honest. I realized that the hard work was done by the operators but the real hard and stressful job was for the supervisors and engineers of the line: maintenance, process, quality, logistics, planning and product engineers were responsible directly with the client, some of them had to stay overtime for two weeks in a row!
As you can imagine, dear readers, the production line work is not for me. But I would like to point out the following: