the LGO journey

2 weeks down

Done with two weeks of my internship at Raytheon.  After working in a service industry for two years, its been quite a challenge to adjust to the corporate world, especially in a union manufacturing plant.  A couple good things:

• they work a 9-80 schedule, which means 80 hours over 9 days and then every other friday off.  big fan of this
• not having to do work after work and on the weekends.  i missed care free and useless weekends
• the scope of my project is pretty wide at this point.  looking at the end to end value stream for an entire plant, from components all the way to assembly at the end of the line.  after only two weeks, there are tremendous opportunities for improvement.  my challenge is figuring out where to focus.  i like the ambiguity of that, but it also scares me at the same time.

A couple challenges opportunities:

• took about a week to get a computer and a desk, which reminded me of an internship in undergrad which took even longer than that (in a 10 week internship nonetheless)
• to get a monitor moved to my new desk, you need to get a work order for someone from the union to physically move it.  when common sense is lacking, it tends to drive me crazy - but trying my best to focus on what I can influence and change
• ive found raytheon people to generally be very competent and smart.  however, it seems that the amount of layers of people and complexity of the material planning and scheduling process leads to a lot of time spent on managing that process.  the company as a whole is pushing for a lot more true continuous improvement on the front lines, but the major challenges are both behavioral and structural.  I hope to have even a small level of impact to drive change in this area and hopefully see some change in behaviors wherever I end up working over the next six months.

Hopefully that’s a good insight into the internship - a topic a lot of prospective and even current students seem to stress about.  All my classmates found out this week where there on-cycle internships will be.  A lot of people are in Europe and others scattered across the US: Austin, Cali, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and even a couple in South America.  Pretty cool.  There going to be about 7-8 of us local in Boston, with most of those being us sheltered new englanders…

19 February 2011 · Comments