<p>I just started my first IE related internship and the very first project I was given, they wanted me to reorganize and redesign the layout of a stock room they use to store electronics.</p>
<p>The place was a mess, they used a bunch of horizontal shelving that took up a lot of space, the product labels were very small and they were storing a lot of stuff that did not belong there.</p>
<p>What I did was, I used some basic concepts of Lean Manufacturing and 5S and suggested getting rid of the horizontal shelving and maximizing vertical space by using vertical shelving, suggested redoing all the labels and moving the product they sell more often closest to the front door. Got rid of all the junk and increased the storage space by at least 30%</p>
<p>My friend is doing a co-op at a manufacturing company and he is essentially doing some of the same things: redesigning layouts, procedures and processes related to manufacturing</p>
<p>For those of you who are working in IE, does your job involve some of these same things I mentioned or are you doing something completely different?</p>
<p>I had a previous IE internship and I did not do any of that. I worked for a railroad, all the live long day… But yeah, there were two units, Business process improvement & Capacity planning.</p>
<p>The main thing I did was build this program to analyze all the data that was coming out of their simulation software. It was a ton of info coming out in .txt files. I wrote a suite of vba programs that would look at a lot of different kpi’s that were important to them and give them the option to dynamically change variables instead of calculating everything on one page and getting overloaded with data. </p>
<p>We also did a bottleneck study. Four different major RR’s trying to get through one line and it wasn’t working smoothly. Got to be the boots on the ground, collected delay data during the 6pm-6am shift for 8 days straight. Then took the info back to HQ and analyzed the data, helped create a presentation to show where the main issues of delay were coming from and why it was happening…</p>
<p>All kinds of things. I design and program (I’m IE and CS) user interface software for consumer electronics. Have also done usability clinics, storyboards, competitive usability analysis work,and so on. No shelving for me B-) </p>
<p>My wife is also IE and CS and Stats and after 20+ years as a manufacturing information systems type is now working as an analytics consultant, essentially trying to make sense via analytics of what the manufacturing information systems are collecting (scheduling, quality,etc).</p>