Factory visit

One of the good things about working in a product development is one gets to see and use the final product with one's software/bugs in it.

Also, it's quite a proud moment to see fellow human beings(customers) using the product.

Often, i have wondered as what exactly goes into the manufacturing of the product and how the whole process happens.

Luckily, last wednesday, i had a chance to see this manufacturing side of the product. Thanks to my manager, our whole team had a one day visit to the factory. It was a great experience. Infact, i was quite sad that few of us are ending up with a different manager from next week!

Coming to the trip, as a first thing, we were given an intro by the director of the factory. Unfortunately, i can neither mention the figures nor the complete details. But it was more than impressive to learn that this factory caters to the 1/3rd of the global company demand.
The factory had more female employees than male employees. When i posed the question as whether female employees are preferred, he replied,"As a company policy, we are not supposed to have any bias based on gender,race, creed. The only reason why there are more female workers is because they pass the dexterity test easily than male candidates". Hence, there are 70% female employees :) Another point which surprised us is the fact this factory is the cheapest in the world, than china as well. That was an amazing news.

Only sad point was, not a single electronic component is supplied by an Indian company. It's all supplied by foreign corporations, and all major component suppliers have set up factories in the same place.

So, overall, this single Software Export Zone (SEZ) employs close to 20000-25000 people directly. This is an amazing figure and stresses the need as why there should be more manufacturing bases in India. (SEZ sounds moronic for a factory zone :))

Later on, we went inside the shop floor. As usual, most of the things are automated, making one appreciate the whole control system concepts :) Infact, Control systems was one of the most difficult subjects during college days and students in the Instrumentation & Control Engineering department had all the difficult subjects as well as difficult professors.

There were few activities in the line which we were manual, although they mentioned they are experimenting the automation process for those as well. I think the car manufacturing has more percentage of assembly line automated when compared to the other device manufacturing.
I wonder whether manual labour might be cheaper than automation for these small tasks in device manufacturing.
But, it was interesting to see the complete process of a real product development. It seems to happen in a jiffy,highly streamlined way and totally different from software development in all good ways :)

One concern though...eventhough the working environment was extremely safe and pleasant, most of the worker ought to stand through out the day. And the work might get really monotonous after a while. Infact, the average age in the factory was in early 20s. I wonder what'll happen as people become old. When i posed this question to the supervisor, he replied that work does get monotonous in any factory and people are given a break of 30mts for every 4 hours, while they can also rest in between if they feel so. This made me wonder about what my parents would have gone through while working in a Textile mill before venturing into business. At the end of the day, there is a difference between blue collar job and white collar job. Yes, even our job gets monotonous at/most of the times...still, there is a difference and we are better off.

I wish i had a chance to talk to a shop floor employee as how one feels and whether they aspire to move to higher things. Because, all these employees are minimum 12th Pass and above 18. Ofcourse, many of them would consider themselves lucky to have this job with all benefits better than many other Indian manufacturing companies. Still, i hope they aspire for many higher things.

Infact, it was nice to see the distance learning courses and few other Learning session details mentioned in their notice board. I am sure they will be getting the same personality development plans as we get as per the process.

btw, there was one silly moment. First time when i saw the factory employees, i exclaimed to my teammate,"Oh...they also have the similar ID cards". She replied,"Yes. it will be similar across the company". This made me realize as how the thought that we are all part of one big company hasn't completely sinked in :)