I did an apprenticeship in food sciences where I could spend some time in many different areas from production to quality management. I started off in a continuous process where our tasks were split into three groups for the operators: working in the control room, inspection rounds and packaging. The inspection round was nicknamed ‘stairs’ because the process is split over four levels and you had to go up and down, ideally once an hour covering the entire production. The three groups could really only communicate via phone. The process runs continuously over one to three days, so technically it is not purely continuous with a lot of start ups and shutdowns, but the plant runs 24/7.
In the control room we mostly dealt with alarms, grouped into yellow and red alarms. Yellow alarms occurred often, for example in the packaging unit there might be a bag that hadn’t been gripped correctly by the robot. Blockages are very common, particularly if you have granules and then the ‘stairs’ responsible must go out and clean up. There’s no camera on the top floor where things happen most frequently because this would get dirty in no time. Cleaning up involves for example opening up the process, taking out blocked mill heads and replacing them with clean ones. The blocked mill heads have to be cleaned afterwards. There are six mills in parallel so there is would be no production stop. Because we deal with a food product, hygiene procedures are very lengthy for the inspection team. As a result there are periods of great activity. On other days, if a product has run well for five hours, you can expect it to run smoothly for the rest of the time.
I like the interaction with the plant and the process. It sounds strange, but faults and alarms are really good to understand the process and to learn what happens in the plant. My colleagues did not all like this because it’s bad for the efficiency and the shift.
But when you work in a good team you work together, and everyone knows what to do and helps each other. And then you got an immediate feedback from the plant that it was working again. Problem solving is very satisfying.
Of course, this depends a lot on the team. I was assigned to a team that worked together, rotating shifts. We worked in three shifts, one starting at 5am, one at 1pm and one at 9pm.
The makeup of the teams working together considers that some colleagues cannot work together. Sometimes colleagues get punished and they get put into a shift together even though the bosses know that they don’t work well together. I could choose to step in for another person to get to know other shifts.
Sometimes instructions from the management weren’t clear. We never sat together with the production manager at a table to see the entire production plan to understand which situation you are in. There was no communication at all.
Shifts were also fighting against each other. So instead of working together, the different shifts would complain about each other at the handover. This started with small things such as emptying the bins or not cleaning a container but also pointing fingers to larger production issues such as not identifying poor quality raw materials in the current batch at handover. There was often bullying behaviour against some colleagues, often new ones without much understanding of the plant. Maybe some colleagues were just bored.
If I were production manager I would not only talk to the shift responsible but to everyone on the team. I would also give more recognition to the teams when they did a good job because it really depends on the individuals, how good they are and how well they manage the process, what decisions they make and how quickly they do them. A pizza for the team that has avoided a five-day plant shutdown is simply not enough. It does not have to be monetary, but there could be a report in the shift book or in the personal file or an email to all the managers. I would spend more time mentioning the positive aspects, what went well during a shift and not only looking into the problems.
More automation could be done in the packaging unit but overall, it is very difficult to automate the plant fully because of the variation in the raw material, which is a natural product. And there must be always more than one person on site for security reasons.
I would like to be a process engineer working in process optimization, specializing in something that I am really good at. I want to be in a higher income bracket, earning a decent salary.