The Summer of 2019, the time during which I interned as a Six Sigma Management trainee at Caterpillar’s small drive-train facility at Hosur, Tamil Nadu. Scorching temperatures, warm breezes and even warmer shop floors, this was all I felt on my first day travel to a facility that was 40 miles away from my home city of Bangalore (Relatively much cooler). Having a previous work experience in IT sector for over 2 years, this exposure was the first of the kind for me in the field of manufacturing. Wanting to specialize in Operations management, this opportunity was something I was eagerly looking forward to before the start of my internship. Living up to my expectations from the internship, the experience was worth every bit of my 80 mile travel every day for the next 2 months.
By the time I joined my internship in April, I had already been trained and certified as a Green Belt in Six Sigma. The internship complimented my training and helped me gain a better understanding of the tools that I was introduced to in Green Belt. My primary engagement (Project) for the 2-month period was to develop a Future State Value Stream Map for the entire facility which consisted of 4 main assembly lines. The facility’s functions primarily catered to the field of manufacturing and R&D serving the Power generation and Transmission industries. The products manufactured primarily include Drivetrain Transmissions.
For starters, the engagement assigned to me required a detailed understanding and analysis of the current state functioning of every station on each of the 4 assembly lines. This meant interviewing and working closely with the line operators, team leads and engineering teams to understand the functionalities at each station and identifying the critical stations and value and non- value adding activities on each line. The data and information obtained were then tabulated into predefined templates for better interpretations (will be discussed later). These interpretations were then used to study the critical stations in every line with primary focus on factors that were causing the outliers in the tabulated data. The Future State Map was then developed based on these studies.
The entire 8 weeks of my engagement was divided into 3 (2-4-2 weeks) critical parts each with its own significance. The first 2 weeks involved a full- fledged exposure to the shop floor that included research into the various top-levels manufactured at the facility, understanding material and information flows and interviewing the TLs and engineering teams to fill the gaps in research information. An important lesson that I learnt here was to ‘Not to reinvent the wheel every single time’. The information that we need is always there with some individual or team in the facility. The trick lies in identifying these individuals and gathering information from them.
The next 4 weeks revolved around tabulating the obtained information and numbers into predefined templates like the OPEs and OEEs, Process Control Systems, Business Risk management, Business Case Validations (to name a few) and develop various graphs and analysis while comparing various parameters and coming up with various hypothesis based on the results obtained. The team then sits with the corresponding engineering teams re-evaluate the conditions of work to improve a few parameters and puts it to test in the last week of this stage. As the history goes these changes will most likely than not put processes into place.
The last 2 weeks involved developing the Future State Map with all the changes made at the critical stations. A Process Control System is implemented to ensure the results obtained in the test phase are constantly reflected in the improved process.
Beyond the work aspect, the experience was much more full-filling in terms of the kind of people I came across in the facility and the (not so common) bond that they shared. Most of the people working the shop floor from various districts of Tamil Nadu. Every individual carried their own unique persona hugely influenced by their varied up-bring and neighborhood. They lived in shared rooms with minimum luxury near the facility, had food at the facility during their shifts and cooked for each other while in their dorms. This was their routine. Their ability to meet the build targets in every single shift on every single day with minimum supervision is quiet fascinating.
Although the lean processes in place at Caterpillar play a crucial role in the overall effectiveness of the facility and the firm, these have also imbibed a culture wherein everyone right from the Line Operators to the Engineering teams to the Plant Manager, seem dedicated to their responsibilities. A sense of commitment and responsibility towards excellence in their work is something I will always remember as my greatest take-away from my internship experience at CAT.