Observations From a Manufacturing Facility

Before I started work this term I didn’t know what to expect to see. This was my first job in the manufacturing sector, and I was looking forward to seeing the dynamic of the industry. The company I work at specializes in designing and manufacturing plastic components for the automotive industry, which means it’s a fast paced high output facility. In this post I will tell you about some of my observations of working at a manufacturing facility.

The first thing that struck me as I was walking around the plant for the first time was the number of women that work there. Since it’s a factory, I expected to see a lot of men on the floor. Since, although stereotypical, I associate factory employees with men. I estimate that 90% of the people on the floor are women. Their job doesn’t require any heavy lifting or strenuous work and this may be the reason behind the large number of women. One engineer casually mentioned to me that women are proven to have better hand-eye coordination, and since most of their work is assembly related they make a perfect match with the job.

The second thing that I noticed was the number of robots in the plant. Every injection moulding machine has a robot on top of it, which grabs the newly moulded part and places on a conveyor belt. I had taken a “Technology and Society” course in university, and one of the aspects we discussed was the replacement of humans with robots. This was seen as a bad thing since it decreased the number of jobs, and hence created unemployment. Personally, I don’t think this theory applies to where I work, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

What amazed me most was the paint robot. The robot is programmed to go through a certain pattern of paint strokes for every part. Paint robots have 6 degrees of freedom (just imagine your arm from shoulder to hand), which means they can mimic human arm movements. The fluidity of the movement, and mind boggling quickness of its painting, leaves me stunned every time I see it working. In fact, the first time I saw the robot in the paint booth, I thought it was the actual person, but the inhuman speed of the movement gave it away.

Lastly, one aspect that makes me appreciate the manufacturing industry is the logistics. Making sure customers get their parts on time, in perfect condition, is not an easy task. You need enough people on site, backup machinery, maintenance crew on hand, material buffers, shipping and handling crew, and the list goes on. Hundreds of operators, supervisors, and engineers work together to make sure all problems are solved quickly and efficiently. Seeing the operation of the plan reminded of a book that I read a few years ago called “Emergence.” In a nutshell Emergence discusses how simple communication through feedback loops creates an emergence of seemingly higher (collective) intelligence, turning simple single unit behaviour into complex collective behaviour. There’s no better example of the emergence of higher intelligence than that of a manufacturing plant.

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