It’s not too often that you get to experience childhood again. Waking up this last Wednesday morning brought back memories of elementary school: waking up early, your heart racing with excitement to get to school… it’s field trip day! As you get dressed and eat breakfast as fast as you can, hurrying Mom out the door, you dream of getting on the bus with all of your friends and taking off to go do something exciting. Who cares that today’s trip is to the wetlands to learn about conservation or look at birds, what’s important is that you are free! The classroom can’t contain you today—your buddies and you will have a blast. The teacher can’t possibly keep the leash tight the whole time, right?!

Well, I must confess… Wednesday wasn’t quite like that. While there were no birds or wetlands (and no mom to wake me up and feed me breakfast) we did go on a field trip, and it was very interesting to see everything we’ve learned in our operations course at work in the real world. All of the first-year class arrived at school to find six buses waiting to send us off to different places for manufacturing site-visits. I was assigned to visit GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms here in Charlottesville. At about 8:15a my group (which only included one other member of my section) boarded a tour bus and started our journey across town to the GE Fanuc plant where we were given a brief presentation about the company and participated in a Q&A session with a panel of executives.

GE Fanuc manufactures automation and embedded systems for use in various industries from car manufacturers and military to food and oil/gas. During our tour of the factory we were given the opportunity to see how the printed circuit boards moved through the production line. Our tour guide was [unsurprisingly] very knowledgeable about Lean manufacturing techniques and we had a very good discussion about how the company is continuing to implement Lean practices into its processes. One of the highlights of the trip for me was being able to see the automation involved in mass-producing the circuit boards. Since Genia is just a start-up, I got to do my fair share of assembling our prototype circuit boards while I was there (minus the automation, of course). It was fun to see the boards go from a blank sheet of silicon (though already punched with traces laid down), to watching the solder paste applied, to watching the mechanical arms scan the boards and then place all of the components, to the final process of the boards moving through the ovens to flow the solder.

The following day we spent our operations class period doing a debrief of the different company visits, with each member of the class talking about how they saw what we have learned put to work.

FYI. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms is actually a joint-venture between General Electric and Fanuc Ltd. of Japan that leads back twenty years to the epoch of trade protectionism between the U.S. and Japan. Recently GE and Fanuc, Ltd. agreed to dissolve their joint-venture. As a result of the dissolution deal, GE will retain control and production of all products except the CNC (a class of manufacturing tools) business.