After more than 15 years of free and easy life, when I decided to get back to manufacturing environment, I was really proud of myself as my skills were not left out over time.
Within one to two months time, I did manage to overcome few of the engineering problem that was faced in the plant which was irritating and causing frequent production down time from time to time. By overcoming such problem, the production process had become stable and more time can be allocated to setting up of various operation standard.
As university graduates is now more common and thus there are quite a number of university graduates in my existing company. It was to my surprise that the education had been very much diverted, to the extend that mechanical engineering graduates do not understand how a coarse and fine tuning mechanism is designed and function. It was another shock to noticed another mechanical engineering student graduate does not know normal bolt and nuts should screw in with clockwise or anti-clockwise rotation.
On checking how the practical training was done during university time and it gave me another shock to know that the practical was done with arrangement for the students to watch video.
Beside the engineering graduates, I noticed U graduates in other departments too with the way they handle operational issue with "pure theory" method of application.May be there are still too fresh and thus very lack of experience, but the problem is whenever an issue was brought up and opinion provided, they tend to have "very good reasoning" of why they are doing a certain thing a certain way.
With the thought that they are fresh graduate with no experience, I started to look into other non-educated staffs who had been working there and had been in the same industries for many years (some of them had been in the industries for twenty over years) even though the company that I am working in is still new. It is again a surprise to note that the working attitude had been very much changed compare to what I had been knowing of.
After more than a year back to the industry I was in and contacted with various old time friends, I started to realized that after quitting for so many from the industry, I am still one of the pioneer and many of those who had been trained by me are now holding the senior management position in various organisations.
By re-looking into my history in this industry, I started off solving engineering problem and introducing modern management method in the first company. Various Standard Operating Procedures were setup during that time. The personal computer was not common during that moment of time, nevertheless I had started of by using spread sheet program to set up various standard forms with built-in function and formula to some extend of automation.
After leaving the first company, I had been in other industries for years before being called to help to rescue the second largest company of the same industry. Beside overcoming their engineering problem by design and upgrading the then 35-years old swing tray oven turn over problem, I proposed to the management on how to introduce varieties in the market to buy time for market development. This proved another success in my carrier.
After a 2+1 years contract as expatriate in China for the same industry, I decided to come back to Malaysia when grand mother gotten old and sick frequently. Since then, I was on my own business of both engineering services and trading, with some diversification to tourism fields.
I was called by an old friend to be a consultant in this new company and helping to solve their engineering matters. After familiar myself with their existing system and getting to know better in the employee attitude and organisation behavior, I am now setting up another dream to help in building a world class manufacturing organisation.
Good manager should work within constraint and lead all fellow subordinates towards the common aim to achieve optimum organisation achievement. Hence I have to paint a big picture to the whole team on how I want the company to be.
This "Big Picture" will be elaborated in future posts, and just for now, I will do it posts after posts to share the steps on how am I going to build my dream.
