Free «Department of Industrial Engineering and Management» Essay Sample

Acknowledgement

Apart from my efforts the success of this project depends largely on the encouragement and guidelines of many others. I take this chance to articulate my heart felt gratitude to the people who have been helpful in the successful completion of my co-op project.

I would like to show my greatest appreciation to Mr. Jordi Calzada and  the department of research and development at Serra Machinery Construction Company. I do not have sufficient words to say thank you. Without his encouragement and guidance this project would not have become successful.

I also thank the entire Serra team form giving me a chance to gain knowledge at their company.

Executive summary:

Serra Salt Company helped me a lot in completion of my co-op project. The main objective of my project is to apply the theoretical knowledge gained in class to a real life situation. Having been studying an engineering course for four years, I have adopted necessary skills to help in solving various problems in the salt production process. I was a part of the team, who solved client X’s production of poor quality product. Deep research is an important part of solving any production process problem. My tasks in the project were: study and make research about the client’s material and plant, researching for solutions, communicating with other departments, simulating the current case and the new solution methods, and finally creating machine and site manual to help workers.

Work Place:

Serra machinery constructions

Serra salt machinery is a company that specializes in designing of salt fields, construction of salt treatment facilities and plants. The company was founded in 1952 in Barcelona, Spain. Mainly, the production process includes:

• Repairing the refining process in order to increase sodium chloride in the process
• Designing the warming ponds and crystallizing equipments.
• Pumping and transporting the salt water.
• Harvesting the salt

Our firm is one of the leading suppliers of equipments related to production of salt in over forty countries around the world. We also supply salt for human use, industrial use, and chemical use. We employ high technology to ensure that we deliver high quality services and products to our customers.

TRAINING TASK ASSIGNMENTS

I encountered many interesting challenges during co-op in industry session. The tasks that I accomplished can be divided into two parts: Reinforcing my engineering knowledge and teamwork involving upgrading of a process plant. I was issued with books on engineering books, chief engineering books, and also machines operating manuals. After two weeks, I was posted to the department of research and development. My first assignment handle was to assist a client, who wanted to improve the quality of products that he offered in his company.  I was expected to analyze his product and come up with an optimum solution to the pitfalls of his products. Later, I was told to communicate with the company’s laboratory and work together with them in order to advance their products. I was also assigned to the process of preparing a plan for the salt plant upgrading process based on both the technical and economics notion. I did with the help of machines operating manuals.

The following are some of the skills that I gained in the course of the four months I worked at Serra: problem diagnosis, research skills, reading and analyzing of civil work maps, appropriate use of chemical apparatus and equipments, and skills on how to arrive an optimum decisions.

I also acquired communication skills and the effectiveness of team work in any organization or industry. I learnt a new language: Spanish. I advanced my interpersonal skills by communicating with different people from different parts of the world and languages, developed my self confidence when I was forced to make weekly presentations. My contribution to the company was basically about representing a full plan of upgrading the processing salt plant as I mentioned before. I worked to the best of my ability, which gave me commendable results. I was happy that my input to the company’s working process produced positive results, which made the company to offer me a job after completing a small test. I have become an expert in AUTOCAD drawings with the help of the company’s chief engineers. I have also written and published machines operation manuals, which will be useful to other employees with insufficient knowledge about machines operations in the company. I feel honored to have had a chance to work with Serra Company.  

Serra Company has transformed my life as an engineering student. It was the best place to acquire adequate skills that will push me up the ladder. The industrial skills that I gained will help me top be able to handle many projects in future.

The co-op project was a paramount task in my Four years course. It is my first task to put in practice all the knowledge I have gained theoretically. My project is based on a Salt machinery company: Serra. I worked in the research and development department, handled a client, who wanted some modification in his company’s systems- the company dealt with the sale of raw salt, which was produced and processed from a natural mine, and lastly I published some salt machines operation manuals. I had to deliver optimum solution to the company’s problems by making many changes and adding some more equipment in their processing plant. This helped them increase their output and at the same time raising the quality of their products.

Ideally, my key tasks accomplished in this report are: Designing of Machinery safety manuals, making decisions on the equipments to install, Troubleshooting the production process, and analyzing a problem in the production sector to come up with an optimum solution.

The research and development department at Serra received a project proposal from a client xx. The project was intended to study their production process and help them improve the quality of their products, which had suffered a big blow in the market. The company was producing raw salt from a salt mine privately owned by that company. The first move by our company was to study and analyze the client’s products by taking their samples and sending them to a laboratory for further analysis. This was a task that could not be completed by our department alone. We needed the help of the engineering department and chemical analysis department in order to deliver an optimum decision.

After a thorough research and sample testing, we realized that the problem was due to the presence of a large number of impurities in Sodium chloride (NACL).

From our findings; we sent recommendation to the client on the improvements that we needed to carry out and after his approval, we changed his company’s operation methods, and upgraded his plant.