Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Plant Treks

One of the cool things about the LGO Program is the plant treks, where the class goes to a manufacturing or distribution facility to see how companies operate in real life. During the summer most of the class goes on 3-4 of these. Our big 2-week domestic (including Puerto Rico, hopefully) plant trek is next January, and there's also an optional international plant trek during spring break.

So far this summer there have been treks to a Staples distribution facility, a Gorton's food processing plant (Paul wrote about this), a Raytheon plant, an Amgen plant, and a Pratt & Whitney (part of UTC, a partner company) manufacturing center. Overall it's really interesting stuff to be able to see how these companies build, assemble and distribute products that people use everyday.

The most recent trek was to Pratt & Whitney's plant in Middletown, CT a couple days ago, where the company assembles and distributes jet engines for commercial and military aircraft. It started out with an overview of the company and the plant, including a couple of videos on how they test the engines against bird impacts and blade liberation... pretty cool stuff.

We then went on a tour of the plant, during which the plant manager told us about the different types of engines they produce, some of the new technologies they're working on, and the assembly process from start to finish. I don't think you have to be into engineering at all to appreciate a jet engine up close- they're just enormous and awesome. Coming from a non-manufacturing background, one of the really surprising things to me so far has been how clean and well-organized most of the plants have been. It really tells you a lot about how operations plays a huge role in how manufacturing companies differentiate themselves these days.

The day ended with a Q&A session, where we got to ask questions to some senior executives. It was helpful to hear about their experiences with the company, how the business has evolved recently and where they see it going. All in all, a very cool experience.

In other news, the summer is over in 2 weeks. It flew by a little too fast I think.