4:55 AM. Slightly later this morning, after we got there too early yesterday. Still tired regardless. Second day of Internship Orientation at JLG. Unfortunately, I cannot report much more to you than I did yesterday as we did pretty much the same thing. We delved even deeper into safety, and learned about some of the standard uses of tools and blueprints.
One thing I did find interesting though, was the lecture on "lean manufacturing." Which is what I will be working on this summer. The concept is simple: finding ways to do what we already do more efficiently. This means making it less expensive, making it more safe, and making it more reliable. There are multiple ways to do this, but the biggest thing it requires is innovation. In order to break the streak of doing things the same way they have always been done, one must think out of the box to discover something that challenges the traditional "paradigm," or previous system. Just as the mp3 player replaced the CD player that replaced the cassette player, it took a breakthrough of tremendous innovation to break free from previous habits. It is one of my lifetime goals to discover a way to make the company I am working for more "lean" through an extremely innovative idea that challenges and hopefully eventually replaces what is already in place. Considering I have no idea what sort of company I will be working for (or what company I will start even) in the future, I cannot even begin to guess what this innovation will comprise of. I will be working on products purely in the manufacturing sense this summer, but it is my hope to do "lean manufacturing" in a company that does not even manufacture something. This will require engineering of systems (I am an industrial & SYSTEMS engineering major anyway), technologies, and most importantly attitudes. JLG is already an incredibly lean company, which will allow me to learn more through what they have already done instead of what I will be doing. At the same time, there will still be a lot of hard work to do.
This was kind of a bullshit blog, as I didn't have a terribly large amount to write about so congratulations if you stick with it. I know that it will get more exciting as I get out of orientation and into the projects I will be working on. Today's quote doesn't really have a terribly large amount to do with today's post, but who cares as I like it.
"Common sense is not so common." - Voltaire
No comments:
Post a Comment